Dante’s Beach, Ravenna

Dante’s Beach, Ravenna

All seven chickens we recently acquired are now laying eggs – except the one called Giovanna, which is walking with a limp thanks to our youngest child Giuseppe, who is ten. The other day, Giuseppe somehow shut Giovanna’s right foot in the back door as he shooed her out of the house.

These chickens are proving portentous. I am convinced they are the catalyst, if not the reason, for why our middle daughter, Magdalena, 17, has just split up with her boyfriend Simone after three years together.

Simone, a truly brilliant pianist, is terrified of chickens, a fairly common phobia apparently, though that is not why we got them. For years we dared not do so for fear that our dog Rocco, who is a rusty-brown-coloured Vizsla – a species bred to hunt birds – would slaughter the lot on sight. But he is old now and so we bit the bullet. Their arrival, however, has set in motion a chain of events and, as with the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in June 1914, who knows where it will all end?

We feared that even if we kept chickens locked up inside the stable, for example, it would make no difference. Rocco would just take up position outside and bark manically at them until they dropped dead from fright, as happened with two cockatiels we once had. In his desperation to kill anything with wings, I have seen........

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