Dante’s Beach, Ravenna
I was in the Land Rover Defender with Rita, my youngest daughter (16), parked up near Dante’s tomb in the old city as we drank coffee from paper cups before she began her day at art school. On a wall in front of us that had possibly been there since the Romans, and definitely since the Renaissance, was scrawled in black spray paint: ‘Palestina libera dal fiume al mare!’ – Free Palestine from the river to the sea!
I asked Rita what mark she’d got in her English literature oral test on Romeo and Juliet. I’d helped her prepare. I’d even found the correct Italian word for ‘apothecary’, as in ‘O true apothecary, Thy drugs are quick’. Every online source I had consulted had said, absurdly, that the correct word is ‘farmacista’. ‘O true chemist.’
‘Six and a half,’ she replied. Miserable. A pass is five, the top mark ten. But to be fair to her, the teacher had only asked questions designed to nail Shakespeare as a plagiarist.
‘What about Italian?’ I asked. ‘I haven’t got the result yet.’ What was it on? ‘Oh some Israeli writer who says Israel’s guilty of genocide in Gaza.’
‘Which writer?’ Rita consulted her phone. ‘David Grossman.’ Ah yes, the well-known left-wing ‘peace activist’ and Booker prizewinner. Here we go again, I thought.
My wife Carla and our six children believe that Israel is guilty of genocide in Gaza. Nearly two-thirds of Italians agree, according to one poll. According to another, nearly half of Italian students think the Israelis are behaving like the Nazis.
I trot out the usual explanations about why it is not genocide, however awful, just war. But it is all water off a duck’s back. In addition, apparently, Italy’s Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, is complicit in the genocide. Magdalena, our middle daughter (18), took part in a demo in nearby Forli, where she’s at music school, during last month’s one-day national general strike against ‘Meloni fascista’ and the ‘Genocidio’. She had painted her face with a Palestinian flag on one cheek and the word ‘FREE’ on the other and chanted: ‘Palestina libera dal fiume al mare!’
‘Could you not at least substitute “Palestinians” for “Palestine”,’ I asked her, ‘so as to give the Jews some chance of survival?’ But she is adamant: the chant does not call for their extermination, just freedom for Palestinians.
Rita’s Italian exam was a written test, so I got her to send me a photo of the paper. It quoted Grossman in an interview with La Repubblica, the equivalent of the Guardian, in which he explained why he used the word genocide to describe the war. The question was: ‘What is the thesis of the writer? What arguments does he use to defend his opinion?’
Unseen by the teacher, Rita had got straight on to WhatsApp to consult the oracle of Dante’s Beach: her mother, my wife. The answers included: ‘Obviously it’s genocide because killing 20,000 children is destroying the future of a country.’ ‘Tell them you’re not part of the International Court of Justice, just a studentessa interested in the situazione.’ ‘There is one army, one of the best armed in the world, against a helpless people. So it’s mass extermination.’ I fear that Rita is in line for a ten on this one.
Gaza comes up all the time around the dinner table. On Sunday evening, Giovanni-Maria (14) had just cooked one of his spag bol specials, and Rita, in a black bikini despite the chilly autumn air, was rolling out pastry to make cinnamon whirls. Magdalena was swanning back and forth from the bathroom with a scarf tied round her head like a keffiyeh. She has met a guy called Luca, a history student at Bologna University, who says he pelts the police with missiles at the anti-everything marches he attends. She showed me a video of him, bare-chested, swirling his impressive waist-length black hair around and around. ‘His record’s seven minutes,’ she said.
Magdalena denies that she is in any way interested in him, but revealed that they have a rendezvous in front of the station because he has asked for some of our chickens’ eggs.
‘To eat or to pelt the police with?’ I asked. By way of an answer she started playing at full volume ‘Bandiera rossa’ followed by a Cuban revolutionary song ‘Comandante Che Guevara’ on her phone. I retaliated with the fascist hymn ‘Giovinezza’ on mine.
Carla emerged from the bedroom to announce: ‘The Israelis are giving back loads of dead Palestinians with missing body organs. Do you know how much a human liver is worth? It’s €100,000!’
‘Why don’t you women all just go off and live with Palestinian men,’ I said.
‘They couldn’t be worse than you,’ said Carla. Hoots of laughter all round. So I decided to read out the last lines of my book on Mussolini, in which I quote his estranged daughter Edda: ‘I hated him. I really hated him. I believe you can only really hate someone you have loved. And when I saw him, my father and all the others, hanging in that barbarous way at the petrol station in Piazzale Loreto in Milan, I said to myself: “It was the final act of love of the Italians for him.”’
‘Not bad,’ said Rita. ‘How many copies did your book sell?’
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