Dante’s Beach, Ravenna

I often feel as if I know what it was like to be a member of La Résistance in Nazi–occupied France because I have three disco-age daughters. Last week, the call-to-action stations flashed up on WhatsApp at 03.06, just as the cockerels were beginning to crow and the enemy was setting up his road blocks. ‘Papà, can you come and get me?’ It was Rita, aged 16.

‘Where are you?’

‘Marina.’ Cristo bloody Santo! A 25-minute drive away. ‘I can walk towards you,’ suggested Rita, the little sweetie.

‘No! Not if you’re wearing a miniskirt,’ I messaged back. ‘Or hot pants.’

She had gone with a girlfriend to Marina di Ravenna, where all the fashionable summer discos are to be found on a dead-straight, three-mile stretch of road that tracks the beach. I felt not anger, but foreboding. To drive along such a road at such a time means running the gauntlet of the numerous types of Italian police, who include the polizia stradale, the vigili urbani and the carabinieri – the military police.

The Italian police spend most of their time, it seems, flagging down cars at random to test not just for drink and drug use, but whatever tickles their fancy. It is the difference between........

© The Spectator