Italy

Wednesday

Nicholas Farrell

Spare a thought for the proud Brits denied tomorrow’s vote

I live in Italy at the heart of the European Union and have witnessed first hand how the euro has destroyed La Dolce Vita and reduced the Italian economy to basket case status. But even though I am a British citizen and probably better equipped than most to see just how awful the EU is, I am not allowed to vote in the referendum tomorrow. Why? Because I have not been registered to vote in the UK within the past 15 years. I may live abroad but I remain proudly British. I fly a Union Jack – bought in a ship’s chandlers in the port of Ravenna where the exiled poet Dante

Monday

Philip Sime

Frexit and Italexit? Support for the EU dwindles in France and Italy

Various freak political events—the unexpected Tory election victory, the rise of Ukip—have conspired to allow Britain to hold its referendum on the EU this week. But if the rest of Europe were asked, what would they say? The Berlin-based Bertelsmann Foundation commissioned a study of 11,000 people in Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Poland to find out their attitudes towards Brexit and to the EU. Just 41 per cent of French and 54 per cent of Germans want us to stay. The Spanish are most keen for Britain to Remain, with 64 per cent opposing Brexit, followed by Poland with 61 per cent. But the survey also revealed that French and Italian referendums

Thursday

Deborah Ross

Highly illogical

Matteo Garrone’s first English-language film is a baroque fantasy based on Pentamerone (Tale of Tales), the 17th-century collection of fairy tales by the Italian poet and courtier Giambattista Basile. (It is also known as The Story of Stories, ‘Lo cunto de li cunti’, but that, I think we can all agree, travels rather less well in the original language.) Garrone, who is best known for his grittily realistic Neapolitan crime drama Gomorrah, has thrown gritty realism entirely to the winds here. Instead, this is fantastically unhinged, veering madly between wonder and horror, gorgeousness and grotesquery, as hearts are eaten, fleas are cuddled, and an old woman’s youth and beauty are

Thursday

Nicholas Farrell

Five-star fantasy

Tom Cruise is an exceptionally beautiful American man with an invincible smile, but he is a member of a cult called Scientology. Virginia Raggi is an exceptionally beautiful Italian woman with an invincible smile but she is a member of a cult called the MoVimento Cinque Stelle (M5S). I understand the attraction of cults in a world in which God has disappeared and our lives are so boringly bad and our political systems worse. But I have yet to come across a cult that does not engender disastrous mental problems. Last Sunday, the radiant Raggi, a 37-year-old lawyer with a small son and a big motorbike, easily won the most

Monday

Nicholas Farrell

Even hungry migrants won’t eat the food in Italy

A few months ago, Nigerian migrants housed at a government hostel in Milan suddenly refused to eat any more of the free food on offer. Italian food is monotonous and indigestable, they explained. Then they went berserk. This was not a one-off case. Far from it. There have been hunger strikes, demos, sit-ins and the odd riot in protest at the stuff. Recently, a group of mainly Pakistani migrants based in a Reggio Emilia hostel were given their own taxpayer-funded chef ‘specializzato in piatti pachistani e africani’. They had complained that Italian food was making them ill. Many migrants en route from Libya to who-knows-where are marooned in Italy for

Thursday

Alexander Chancellor

Long life | 26 May 2016

When your mind suddenly goes wonky, you may be the one person who doesn’t realise that there is something wrong with it. That’s what happened a month ago when I was on a country holiday in Tuscany with my wife. It was lovely weather, and lunch had been laid out of doors. I had cooked a sea bass and was feeling rather pleased with myself. We were both happy, and things could hardly have been better. But everything began to go wrong when my wife decided to ask if I could pass her a knife. A knife? I didn’t know what a knife was. I had never heard of such

Thomas Marks

The Romantic poets

People can be mightily protective of their Romantic poets. When I worked at the Keats Shelley House, overlooking the Spanish Steps in Rome, one of my colleagues developed a callus on her hand where the daily task of locking the museum door — emphatically — caused the key to abrade her skin. And when I last visited Keats’s grave, with a friend, in the city’s Non-Catholic Cemetery, a middle-aged Italian woman snapped at us to shut up as she muttered through a printout of ‘To Autumn’. It’s strange in a way that Keats should inspire such devotion in Rome, since he wrote no poetry in Italy and only a handful

Thursday

Alexander Chancellor

Long life | 21 April 2016

As we prepare in Britain for our momentous referendum in June, Italy has just had one. It happened last Sunday while I was on holiday in Tuscany, and it was about as futile an exercise in democracy as there could be. Italy has lots of referendums. They come in two kinds. First, there is the constitutional referendum, which is used to approve any change to the constitution that has been passed twice by both houses of parliament. Then there is the popular referendum, which is held by popular demand to request the abolition of the other kinds of law that parliament has enacted. Constitutional referendums are rare. Since the famous

Thursday

Martin Gayford

Repeat prescription

Walter Sickert was once shown a room full of paintings by a proud collector, who had purchased them on the understanding that they were authentic Sickerts. The painter took one look around, then announced genially, none of these are mine, ‘But none the worse for that!’ Were Giorgione to return to life, and take a stroll around the Sackler Galleries at the Royal Academy, he might echo those words. Few of the works on show, in all probability, were actually executed by Giorgione, but they are none the less magnificent for that. This is — wisely — not an exhibition that attempts to reassemble the artistic personality of that enigmatic

Thursday

Fisun Güner

On the trail of Piero

Piero della Francesca is today acknowledged as one of the foundational artists of the Renaissance. Aldous Huxley thought his ‘Resurrection’ ‘the best painting in the world’. His compositions marry art and science with cool precision and a sophisticated grasp of perspective — he was, after all, a mathematician. But he was only rediscovered in the mid-19th century after centuries of relative obscurity. Following his death in 1492, his artistic achievements faded in the memory and he became known chiefly as a geometer (his numerous writings include an innovative treatise on solid geometry and perspective). This is not wholly surprising. Many of the most impressive paintings in Piero’s oeuvre are not

Thursday

Linda Cookson

Lake Iseo

If you’ve never heard of Lake Iseo, you’re not alone. Nestling shyly between chocolate-box Como and glamorous Garda, the smallest of Lombardy’s four major lakes has quietly resisted the limelight over the centuries. Fashionistas may frolic on photo shoots in Garda’s ritzy spas, while excursion boats patrol Como’s west bank in the hope of spotting George Clooney in his front garden. But pint-sized Iseo shelters beneath cascades of forest, her charms undisturbed by tourist hordes. Iseo’s waters shimmer benignly amid nothing more disruptive than birdsong, the splashing of traghetti boats and the occasional peal of church bells. Inevitably, a few cognoscenti have rumbled Lake Iseo’s unique brand of magic over

Thursday

Annie Nightingale

The pleasures of Puglia

If Italy is the elegant, over-the-knee boot plunged into the Mediterranean, then Puglia is the narrow peninsula that forms its spiky stiletto heel. The word that springs to mind regarding Puglia is trullo — miniature stone structures that look like igloos, and in my experience are the ideal devices to convince your kids to holiday with you. Why would they choose an eight-day party in Croatia when they can stay in cute white circular mini-houses, with an infinity pool in front? Even better, you could go for a trulli hotel, complete with that Puglian speciality, the beach pool. And into these beach pools wade the Italians, with their indifferent attitude

Elisa Segrave

The rarest blend of white and gold

This unusual book is beautifully written, produced and illustrated, but its subject — the small Slender-billed curlew — is strangely absent. In his ‘introduction to a ghost’, Horatio Clare explains that, when he was commissioned to tell the story of the western world’s rarest bird, it did, at least officially, still exist. This grail of the birding world, which he has never seen, he describes as a beautiful creature, a species of curlew plumaged in a blend of whites and golds, with dark spots on the flanks, slim and graceful of form, more refined than the plump common curlew, with a thinner down-curving beak which makes it look as though

Peter Phillips

Murder, he wrote

The allure of Carlo Gesualdo, eighth Count of Conza and third Prince of Venosa, has been felt by music-lovers from the humblest madrigal singer to the likes of Stravinsky, Boulez and Werner Herzog. Now, just three years after celebrating the 400th anniversary of his death in 1613, his birth in 1566 gives us a second chance to remind ourselves of that heady mix of murder and chromaticism that so famously characterises his life and work. For most classical composers the music is the way into the biography. Beethoven’s deafness becomes interesting once one has got to know the Missa Solemnis. Enquiry into the circumstances that surrounded Mozart’s death begins with

Thursday

Allan Massie

Pisa

Say ‘Pisa’ and everyone thinks of the Leaning Tower. Fair enough; it’s a curiosity, and the tourist board must be pleased that Mussolini’s plan to straighten it came to nothing. It stands, or leans, next to the cathedral in the Piazza dei Miracoli, and beyond the cathedral is the Baptistry, one of the most beautiful buildings in Italy. I was in Pisa for the annual book festival, which attracts an extraordinary number of independent publishers and huge audiences (25,000 over a long weekend). Each year the director, Lucia della Porta, invites a foreign delegation, and this was Scotland’s turn. We were housed in the Royal Victoria Hotel, which dates from

Thursday

Katy Balls

Cable cars, cheese and chic on the quieter side of the Alps

‘It sounds like you’re having an Ann Summers party up there,’ a male traveller called, as our group erupted into girlish hysterics on the viewing terrace of Punta Helbronner, a mountain in the Mont Blanc massif. Unfortunately for him there was no lingerie in sight; instead our shrieks had been brought on by the threat of a lightning storm hitting us at 3,462 metres up. As my hair stood on end and my phone crackled, a guide ushered us back to the cable car, part of the new Mont Blanc skyway which offers the idler Alpine adventurer an easy way to get close to Europe’s largest peak. Still, there’s something

Thursday

Jasper Rees

There will be blood | 17 September 2015

If you don’t want to spend hundreds of euros on a good seat, the best place to watch the Palio di Siena is by the start. For my first time — decades ago — I arrived early in the apron-shaped Piazza del Campo and sweated out the long afternoon as a tide of tension rose. By early evening, when the horses and jockeys finally entered from the courtyard of the towering Palazzo Pubblico, 50,000 spectators ached for release. I clambered on to a temporary fence for a better view. A Sienese woman who was maybe 19 hauled herself up and, for balance, grabbed me from behind. As the jockeys embarked

Thursday

Bruce Anderson

Stewed Siena

The Indian summer was still fending off the mists and mellow fruitfulness. But the autumn term was about to begin; the season’s changes would soon be manifest. So it was a day for anecdote and recapitulation; for telling amusing August tales, behind which lurked deeper meanings. A couple of friends had been to the Palio, as everyone should, once. I remember being surprised that several hours of mediaeval pageantry could hold one’s attention, which it certainly did: but more than once? No one would watch Psycho twice. I also remember being surprised that the young of Siena would spend weeks rehearsing: hard to imagine that happening here. The spectacle ends

Thursday

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 27 August 2015

I sprinted through Milan station, speed-read the departures monitor without stopping, and arrived gasping on platform 8 with two minutes to spare. The driver of the FrecciaBianca bullet train was waiting only for the guard’s signal to depart. The guard was standing on the platform beside the open door of the rearmost carriage, fingering her whistle. This short, plump, raven-haired woman was exuding geniality and relaxed informality through her far too big peaked cap and ill-fitting uniform as though it were fancy dress. I was about to fling myself up the short ladder, but had to step aside for lust’s young dream in satin hot pants descending the steps with

Thursday

Tanya Gold

Trattoria tour

The Gatto Nero — or ‘Black Cat’ — is in Burano, a tiny island in the Venetian lagoon. It is close to ‘haunted’ Torcello, with its ancient campanile and its branch of the Cipriani restaurant. (The only equivalent thing I can imagine is a branch of Soho House at Dracula’s castle, or possibly Chernobyl.) I like the name Black Cat; it reminds me of the Blue Parrot in Casablanca. I like that you must leave San Marco, with its tat and wonders combining queasily, to get here; I like the brightly coloured houses like Bratz dolls fighting; it looks, to me, like Notting Hill with fish, lace and a soul.