The Antica Roma is an ice-cream shop near the Spanish Steps in Rome; recently, it served four English tourists called the Bannisters and Their Wives. Mr Bannister was so surprised to receive a bill for €64 for four ice creams that he, or possibly someone representing him, contacted the Daily Mail, as certain tourists do in times of crisis.
It has now rolled out into one of the sillier diplomatic incidents, which usually go like this. A) The crime. €64? That’s mad. Fucking Italians. Do you have a photocopy of the receipt? Can we take your picture? Yes? Look more sad. Fucking Italians. Look more sad. Paul! [Dacre!] We have a story about thieving Italian ice-cream rob dogs. Yes the Bannisters and Their Wives are white. I don’t think they are on benefits.
B) The backlash. What is wrong with charging €64 for four ice creams of superb quality? Fucking racists. Fucking ugly racists. Fucking ugly British racists. Why do they come to the Eternal Gelaterie if they hate us so much? I thought they all voted BNUkip in fucking ugly British racist land; let them eat ice cream in the shape of the EDL’s underpants.
C) The Backlash to the Backlash, also known as The Apology. Come back to Rome, the Bannisters and Their Wives. The mayor will host you, and a ridiculously dressed Italian policeman will greet you and make sure you will not have to show your passport at the airport. He will wear feathers. (Actually no one will have to show their passport in Rome again, ever, if they can prove they are here to eat ice cream.) You will be invited to parties, the Bannisters and Their Wives, and dragged around ice-cream shops, and force fed ice cream you will not have to pay for, and you will be photographed looking happy. Look more happy. Please don’t throw up; it’s only your tenth ice cream.
Actually the owners of Antica Roma operate an evil ice-cream monopoly. It was in the Independent. They have this whole city sewn up, in ice-cream terms. Even Pope Francis is in on it. His favourite is Banana. He’s bit of a slut for a wafer. Please don’t tell anyone. Look more happy.
This, in brief, is how A and I came to be eating in Antica Roma, an ice-cream shop near the Spanish Steps in Rome. A is slightly depressed because he combed his hair for Mass (rhymes with ‘class’) and it has gone, he says, ‘All A.C. Grayling’. So this is an attempt to re-inflate his self-esteem, or make him eat his feelings, or find something interesting to say about the eurozone, whichever comes first. It is gaudy. There is no Mr Whippy here; they are, in pudding terms, as remote as boring old Anglicanism is from fabulous Roman Catholicism. There is what I can only call an ice-cream flower arrangement on the counter; a vast complex planet of various cones, all studded with glowing neon flowers. It’s like a mad meadow for gingerbread men, or, as A says, ‘a Cornetto-copia’. The menu is long, red and incomprehensible, and it has photographs of ice cream, some of which is sculpted into faces. I think I spot Mussolini in Mocha Choca (I thought only Jews did that). In ice-cream terms, Antica Roma is a brothel. And they walked right in. You’re very famous in England now, I tell the man behind the counter. I know, he says.
I order chocolate, toffee and vanilla. I have no idea what A has. I’m not that kind of wife. It arrives with yellow and green wafer poles, red wafer fans, a brown wafer hat, and cream, and what proper food critics call ‘sprinkles’. It’s Venice on a plate and melting; it’s every metaphor that ever died upon a page and I love it. The cost for two is €33. The Bannisters and their Wives: 0. The Spectator: 1.
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