Dante’s Beach, Ravenna
The unseasonably warm wind blowing in across the fields from the brooding Adriatic caused my wife Carla to announce ‘Tira aria da terremoto’ (‘earthquake air’). She feels our family lives on a knife edge, encircled by omens and demons. And who can blame her?
Looked at one way, we have had it pretty tough of late. The other day the post person, who is a woman on a three-wheeled scooter and never brings good news, handed me with her grim habitual smirk a court order obtained by Ravenna city council. It requires us to demolish the front door of our house and a skylight on the sloping roof of the kitchen, plus the shutters on the first-floor windows. We have to comply within 60 days or else the council, which has been red since the fall of fascism, will do so and send us the bill. Our crime, for that is how it is described, was committed donkey’s years ago when a geometra, an evil race of people required for such matters, was in charge of restoration work at our house, and yet it is we who take the hit. No doubt I’ll have to conjure up a large amount of cash from nowhere to pay council officials for a written statement that says: ‘Actually the door and skylight are really rather wonderful, as are those shutters, and all in such perfect harmony with the general aesthetic of the house.’
Three, maybe four, days later my ancient seven-seater Land Rover Defender 2.4 Puma came to a halt outside the post-Communist party social club with my eldest daughter Caterina, 22, at the wheel. Not even I was able to get it to move when I arrived at the scene, as it made a hideous grinding sound whenever I tried to get it into gear. Later, Guiducci the tobacconist, a former communist and the richest man in the village, could not resist telling me how funny it was that the anti-communist Inglese had broken down there of all places in his la-di-da Land Rover.
Some may feel that as I can afford a Defender I am a spoilt brat, and they will be happy too at this news. But that is most unfair. I haven’t been on holiday since 2009, unless you count my life as one big holiday. I did once, it is true, earn good money in Italy working as a minor 15-minute celebrity for a couple of newspapers, which is why I could buy a Defender. But Italian print journalism collapsed around the time the banks did. From then on, people like me got paid less than dish-washers.
I called Carlo, a retired mechanic whose youngest child was stolen from him by post-communist social workers on the grounds that he is too old to be a father. The problem was a snapped front prop shaft, he discovered, and the snapped-off end was wedged between the exhaust pipe and the chassis. So Giovanni Maria, 14, went underneath to hammer it free. He then inserted it inside a long piece of plastic waste-pipe that we had got from home and he tied that tight to the chassis with washing-line cable. This allowed the prop shaft to rotate once we moved off, but not to thrash about and wreak havoc. He did a first-rate job and made me think: children are a resource and a pleasure, not a cost and a pain.
What we call ‘cheating’, the Italians call ‘cunning’. A prince must be cunning like a fox, wrote Machiavelli
We made it more or less normally to the Sri Lankan mechanic Siri about five miles away, with whom I like to think I have a natural bond based on curry, cricket and empire. He put our wounded vehicle on his car lift and unbolted the other end of the prop shaft and took it off. He wanted only €50, and a new one can wait, he said with a chuckle, as a Defender works fine with only the rear prop shaft as long as you don’t go off piste. It will cost about €200, but that’s peanuts in Land Rover terms. So for a while more, the chorus cry of ‘sell the corpse’ each time something goes wrong from Carla and most of our six children has once more fallen silent.
But one thing really has got me down and it is what happened when my eldest son, Francesco Winston, 20, went to Bologna last week to take the entrance exam to study to be a vet at the university after two months of preparatory lessons online. A total of 65,000 people did the exam for 25,000 medical school places, including 6,000 for 1,400 veterinary school places. But there were no checks for mobile phones, and there were widespread reports of cheating using AI. A popular trick was to go in with €300 Ray-Ban Meta glasses able to take photos of the exam questions and then access AI to answer them.
‘All it tells me is that you have to fare il furbo to get on in this shitty country,’ said Francesco Winston. What we call ‘cheating’, the Italians call ‘cunning’. And ‘fare il furbo’ means ‘be cunning’. A prince must be cunning like a fox, wrote Machiavelli.
In Britain, to call someone a cheat is an insult. In Italy, to call someone un furbo is a compliment. My son regards himself as Italian, but he finds this admiration for the person who is furbo despicable. Yet it explains so much about Italy. So I said: ‘Do you want me to buy you some Ray-Ban Meta glasses if you fail to get in this time?’
I know what you are thinking and here’s my reply: I’d rather have no front door than sell the Defender to pay the council!
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