Dante’s Beach, Ravenna

I was parked up in the Land Rover Defender on the narrow road that runs alongside the strip of dense pine forest next to the sea. My three youngest children, Rita (16), Giovanni Maria (14) and Giuseppe (ten), had just been for the first swim of the year and were now inside the forest picking wild asparagus. I could not see the sea, which was about 200 yards away on the other side of the forest, but I could hear the sound of it like the low-level roar of a distant motorway.

Then I heard the honk of a car horn. I looked up from my phone, which I was using to help me contemplate the difference between Jeffrey ‘Lolita Express’ Epstein and Silvio ‘Bunga Bunga’ Berlusconi.

A small grey car had stopped next to me. The driver, his face transformed into a silhouette by the late afternoon sun, looked like E.T. He motioned me to roll down my passenger window as he rolled down his. ‘Ciao, Farrell, ciao!’ Oh God, it was Wini the naked communist!

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