Dolce vita
No, I’m not a British spy
Dante’s Beach, Ravenna The youngest of our six children, Giuseppe, nine, received the Eucharist for the first time on Sunday.…
Pope Francis, my love rival
To be honest, I felt relief when Pope Francis died. This had nothing much to do with his regular assertion,…
The day the King came to Ravenna
Dante’s Beach, Ravenna ‘Fortune’s a right whore: If she give aught, she deals it in small parcels,/ That she may…
Why I won’t accept the Laurels of Dante
Dante’s Beach, Ravenna I have just refused to accept the local equivalent of an Oscar, which was to have been…
Drinking with The Chemist – and God
Dante’s Beach, Ravenna The closest I get to a social life these days is when I sneak off into town…
My night with Mussolini’s ghost
Dante’s Beach, Ravenna I came to Italy to write a biography of Benito Mussolini in the summer of 1998 and…
The slippery business of catching a snake
Dante’s Beach, Ravenna It is strange how events elide and create a pattern whose significance remains elusive. I had just…
My teenage Interrailing adventures
Dante’s Beach, Ravenna In my life I have nearly killed myself mainly with cigarettes and alcohol and dangerous journeys into…
My Egyptian mau pyramid scheme
Dante’s Beach, Ravenna Was it chance or destiny, I wonder, that caused the eldest of our six children, Caterina, to…
Watching the Euros final in Italy was a bad idea
There was not a Spaniard in sight, I was pretty sure of that. But I was surrounded by the enemy,…
Italians are beautiful – but not on this beach
When Pope Francis complained recently about too much frociaggine (faggotry) in the Catholic Church, he certainly struck a chord in…
Who will my wife marry next?
Since I had a brush with death a couple of years ago, I have often wondered who my far younger…
Under the Italian sun, the insects are stirring
The sun was setting on the first day of spring and I felt unusually happy as I fed the donkey.…
How I ran away to Italy
A quarter of a century ago I somehow managed to get out of Paris where I had haunted a cheap…
