Years of exposure to their arrogance, illegality and sense of entitlement has shown me that Italy’s cyclists are a public menace. So the news that Giorgia Meloni’s right-wing government has announced a crackdown on them brought a smile to my face. Transport minister Matteo Salvini told parliament that cyclists could have to wear helmets, get insurance, display a number plate and even indicators. That’ll teach them.

Italy’s cyclists break the laws that already exist pathologically. Anything that tries at long last to rein them in must be welcome. On Coffee House, Jake Wallis Simons suggests that Salvini is victimising cyclists because they are symbols of left-wing eco-fanaticism. He’s wrong.

For many generations, the bicycle had mass appeal in Italy long before the recent obsession with saving the planet took hold, and Italy has produced many world champions.

That tells you all you need to now about just how protected a species the cyclist is in Italy

In Forlì, in the Romagna in the north of Italy, where, for many years I worked on a regional newspaper, the first column I wrote was a tirade against cyclists. The Romagna is especially passionate about la bici because it was always the standard means of transport for il popolo, a bit like in China. Since 1945, the Romagna has been the stronghold of the Italian communist and post-communist left.

‘We are not supposed to mock the afflicted,’ I wrote, ‘but I could not help cheer when I read the other day that a cyclist had disappeared into a huge hole in the road he had seen too late and had not come out.’

I then expressed my bewilderment as a law-abiding subject of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II who finds himself in Italy confronted by Italian cyclists constantly riding up one-way streets the wrong way and at night never having lights on their bicycles. On country roads, even today, herds of them – looking like mechanical pheasants and riding two or three abreast – force motorists to waste precious time watching their lycra-clad rear ends bobbing up and down.

That article produced more letters, mostly hostile, than anything I have ever written in any country except for one in which I said that Italian restaurant food is nearly always dreadful which, of course, it is.

On a roll, I decided to start a weekly column called ‘Vacche Sacre’ (Sacred Cows), which I hoped would wind up cyclists even more. It did.

We positioned a photographer at the end of Corso Garibaldi in the centre of Forlì. Corso Garibaldi is one-way, very long and narrow and connects the old city walls to the city centre. Cyclists go into it the wrong way in their droves from the piazza. They are thus a serious danger to themselves and everyone else. Naturally, they are never fined by any of Italy’s numerous types of police.

So, once a week, our photographer would leap out and snap one of these sacred cow cyclists and a reporter would pounce and ask: ‘Well, what have you got to say for yourself?’

I told the photographer that the richer and smugger the cyclist looked the better. We used to publish their photo along with their ludicrous attempts at self-justification. In the end, though, I was forced to abandon the column. It was having a negative effect on advertising.

And that tells you all you need to now about just how protected a species the cyclist is in Italy – especially in the Rossa Romagna (Red Romagna) as it is known.

I now live about 20 miles from Forlì, in the countryside near the coast outside Ravenna, last capital of the western Roman empire and burial site of Dante. These days, my near-death experiences with cyclists usually occur at night on the very narrow, deadly road that connects Ravenna to Dante’s Beach by the sea.

The road is a death trap because it is too narrow and people drive too fast. I have nothing to prove anymore and so trundle along at 50 miles an hour in my Defender with a load of kids on board. Suddenly in the blackness in front of me is a cyclist. With no lights. I swerve in the nick of time. Sometimes I am so angry that I stop, wind down the window, and shout. ‘Cornuto! Morto di fame!’  (Cuckold! Deadbeat!)

And they shout back. They can shout all they want but it is quite simply outrageous of cyclists to do this at night on such a road as that. But they just do not get it.

I’m afraid I just cannot agree with Wallis Simons who has described the move by Salvini as ‘oppression’. Wallis Simons also falls into the easy trap of suggesting that Salvini’s proposed crack-down on cyclists is somehow inspired by fascism. He writes:

‘The brute intrusion of state regulation into the innocent world of personal cycling feels like a hard-leftist putsch, not seen in any other European country, even France. In Salvini’s reactionary mind, however, the repression of the cyclist was not born of socialism but a sort of post-Mussolinism.’

Mamma mia! Like most people – undoubtedly the majority – Salvini opposes the tyranny of the cyclist, not in the name of fascism, but in the name of liberty. The liberty, for instance, to go to work. You need look no further than London to see where such a two-wheel tyranny leads. It’s not reactionary, it’s democracy. And just so we all know, actually the Duce loved bicycles.

Anyway, let’s all calm down. Salvini is already back-tracking and saying that he will only introduce the new rules for e-bikes and probably not for bicycles.

But even if he did include bicycles, Italy’s cyclists would not pay a blind bit of notice, just as they don’t in regard to all the existing laws they ignore.