Italy

Right now, it’s a bit like you’re five years old and it’s the night before Christmas but you can’t be sure who is going to come down the chimney, Santa Claus or Benito Mussolini. I mean for football fans – not for the public school bedwetters on here who refer to the world’s favourite sport as ‘girlball’. Italy are unbeaten in their last 33 games: good. Runs come to an end sooner or later. This is a game tailor-made for Southgate’s favourite tactics of stifling containment. This may well turn out to be one of the most boring matches in the history of football. I would start with Sancho and

We were discussing travel, that forbidden delight now tantalisingly close. Where would be our first destination? Forswearing originality, I chose Venice. Among the world’s greatest paintings, one in particular does not merely come to mind. It fills the mind. I have never been in the Serenissima for the Feast of the Assumption of the Virgin, probably just as well. In mid-August, there are bound to be pedestrian traffic jams all the way from the Piazza to the Rialto. But it is possible to imagine the event. Go to Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari. Use your inner eye to fill the church with the entire nobility of Venice, festooned with gold

When Napoleon III proclaimed himself Emperor of France in 1852, he unwittingly kickstarted quality wine production in Chile and Argentina. A mass exodus of republicans ensued, one of whom happened to be a skilled agronomist from Tours named Michel Aimé Pouget. Pouget carried with him a cache of French grape cuttings that were to change the course of wine history and formed the basis for Argentina’s wine industry today. Because of the phylloxera plague, French wine production fell by 75 per cent between 1875 and 1889. Today the vines of Europe are still grafted on to phylloxera-resistant American root stock. In Argentina and Chile, which have no phylloxera, old ungrafted

Worse tales have emerged during the pandemic than that of the ‘Florence Three’ – Rhys James, Quinn Paczesny and Will Castle, who have all now returned home to Britain after 61 days incarcerated in a hotel in the Italian city. Some might say a couple of months stuck in Florence could have been a blessing – and so it might have been, had they not each been stuck in solitary confinement and fed microwaved mush, with no more chance to go out to a trattoria than to visit the Uffizi. But what stands out about the story of the Florence Three is not so much their plight, but what it

Here’s a tip. When the Foreign Office advises against going somewhere, hop on the next plane. The mandarins have advised against visiting Italy because of Covid-19. It’s as bizarre as everything else that our rulers have said about the virus. Confirmed cases in the UK are currently more than twice as high per 100,000 as in Italy. Anyone with our welfare at heart should be telling us to go to Italy at once. I left the next day. The Italians could be forgiven for serving us our own medicine and quarantining all arrivals from the UK. As it is, they test you at the airport, and quarantine is only required

‘The Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day’: surely one of the most beautiful images in all writing. One might have thought that it would have softened the Almighty’s mood, so that He would have given Adam and Eve a mere ticking-off for scrumping. But no: that stroll ended in the doctrine of original sin. For those who suffer under it, there is one aesthetic relief from stifling, humid heat: stucco seen through green-leaved branches. That combination refreshes the soul. It works even better, of course, if lesser regions have a less aesthetic form of refreshment: the cool of the glass. In pursuit of garden