Dante’s Beach, Ravenna

We were en route to the junk shop in search of a pair of robust tongs for the fire in the kitchen, which is a vital source of heat in winter, and I was rowing with my family about the Jews.

There were seven of us inside the Land Rover Defender: me at the wheel in notional control with my ‘Comandante’ Basque beret on my head to cover my bald patch. Next to me was my wife Carla, who has the best deck this side of Rimini, and five of our six children behind.

The language being spoken was Italian as usual, but there were frequent shouted bursts of English from the back such as ‘Just shut the fuck up!’ or ‘Jesus fucking Christ!’, often involving several voices in unison like a chorus. The aim was to taunt me, as such expressions – so it is claimed – are the only English I have ever taught my children. They are also designed to shout me down and make me lose the plot.

What prompted the row was the forthcoming trip this week by Magdalena, 18, with her class from music school, to Fossoli near Modena to mark Holocaust Memorial Day. Fossoli was one of very few prison camps in Italy where Jews were held before transit by train to the Nazi extermination camps. I was hoping that a visit to Fossoli might at least change Magdalena’s understanding of what the word ‘genocide’ actually means.

As I’ve said before, she – like her mother and her brothers and sisters, even little Giuseppe, aged ten – believes that the killing of 70,000 Palestinians as a result of Israeli military action in Gaza since October 2023 is genocide. Obviously, however brutal and possibly criminal that is, it is not genocide, because the intention is to exterminate Hamas, not the Palestinians.

But what happened at Fossoli was genocide: Jews were brought there as part of a plan to exterminate them. True, who exactly in Italy, or even in Germany, knew about this plan is not easy to pin down. But that does not alter the truth.

It is rarely mentioned, but Italian fascism was not anti-Semitic until Mussolini’s fatal alliance with Hitler, and no Jews were arrested or deported to the Nazi extermination camps until after his fall in July 1943, following the Allied landings in Sicily. But once Hitler had installed Mussolini as a puppet dictator in the un-liberated north of Italy in September 1943, Italian fascists collaborated with the Germans to arrest Jews.

Magdalena was adamant, though, that the trip to Fossoli would change nothing. ‘Whether you’re killed in a gas chamber or by a bomb doesn’t make much difference!’ she snapped.

I decided to throw a spanner in the works which led to the discovery of a strange co-incidence. ‘Your Italian grandfather fought alongside the Germans!’ I bellowed at the lot of them. ‘Wasn’t he guilty of genocide?!’ ‘My father never killed anyone, inglese di merda!’ shouted Carla.

This was probably true. Narciso Camerani served in occupied Greece as a conscripted sub-lieutenant in an infantry division stationed in the Peloponnese. For two years, he led a tranquil life and the most dramatic thing to happen to him, apart from falling in love with a Greek woman, was the night he lost his mule, which was punishable by death. There was a full moon as he patrolled the perimeter area of his barracks and the mule, a female, startled by the shadow of a tree, threw him off and bolted. Eventually he gave up looking and returned to base, expecting the worst – but fate had decreed that he should find the mule back in her stable.

On 8 September 1943, however, Italy’s new government surrendered to the Allies without warning its armed forces. It merely ordered them to cease fighting the Allies but ‘react to attacks from any other source’. Its confusion and cowardice doomed those few who decided to keep their arms and turn them on the Nazis, such as on Cephalonia, where about 9,500 died. The 650,000 who did surrender were sent to labour camps in Germany as traitors, not prisoners of war.

Carla’s father told his family that they had to eat worms and grass and, once, a poodle belonging to a guard

‘Wietzendorf,’ said Carla. ‘A death camp, my father called it.’ I did not know until then that Wietzendorf near Hanover was where Carla’s father was interned, as he died the year she and I met. But Wietzendorf was also where Andrea Giovene, the last Duke of Girasole, was interned.

Giovene later wrote a brilliant autobiographical novel, Sansevero, often compared to The Leopard, but more like Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. I once praised it in The Spectator and his son Lorenzo got in touch and we became friends.

Giovene, too, had been in the Peloponnese, as a captain in a Lancer division. How odd that I should meet Lorenzo, who lives most of the time in London, and Carla at virtually the same time in 1998, but not know about the connection.

Perhaps Andrea Giovene and Narciso Camerani had known each other. Carla’s father told his family that they had to eat worms and grass and, once, a poodle belonging to a guard, which they managed to kill and turn into a stew. In the final months of the war, they feared the Germans would kill them as had happened in other camps.

Somehow Giovene, badly injured in an American air raid and after weeks of wandering through apocalyptic scenes, found a train  back to his home near Bene-vento. Carla’s father had to walk back to Forlì, his hometown in the red Romagna, where he feared for his life at the hands of communist partisans, as they would regard him as a fascist even though he had refused to fight on and had never been one. It took him two months and he weighed, they said, just five stone.

They would both have been my enemies. Yet I cannot help admiring them immensely.

The junk shop did not have any tongs.