There was not a Spaniard in sight, I was pretty sure of that. But I was surrounded by the enemy, nevertheless. Naturally, the enemy included my Italian wife, Carla. We were at the open-air restaurant for the Euro 2024 final in one of the two village campsites not far from the nudist beach. If England beat Spain, I would have a plausible excuse to break out the booze after being on the wagon for far too many months and get patriotically sloshed.
I knew that none of those gathered in front of the giant TV screen beneath the stars could be from Spain, because the Spanish do not come to Dante’s Beach near Ravenna. Nudism isn’t really their cup of tea.
Instead, we get loads of Germans and Dutch who drive thousands of miles to strut about naked in front of each other. Mercifully, their national teams had been knocked out early, so we did not have to run the risk of unclothed Germans singing ‘Deutschland über alles’, or their Dutch equivalent singing football hits from their national repertoire, such as ‘Hup Holland Hup’.
Tonight, the German and Dutch nudists were nowhere to be seen. To be honest, wandering about naked in public isn’t exactly my thing either, or Carla’s as far as I know, but her family have lived here for more than half a century which was well before the nudists took over the best part of the beach and refused to leave.
They may not have been Spaniards in front of the giant TV screen, but they were all ‘Me-di-terr-an-eo’, as they say in Italy, and so all wanted Spain to win. That’s just the way it is. We inglesi are not much loved in the Mediterranean. It has to do, I think, with the weird juxtaposition of two national stereotypes: the English gentleman, who is a complete cad, and the English hooligan, who is a complete animal.
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