Dante’s Beach, Ravenna

I was on my way to buy a bougainvillea from the plant shop with my middle son, Giovanni Maria, 14. We were in the Land Rover Defender, windows down with ‘Satisfaction’ by the Rolling Stones on the stereo at very high ‘hey, hey, hey!’ volume. Each time the chorus arrived – ‘I can’t get no!/ Hey, hey, hey!/ That’s what I say!’ – we rapped our knuckles on the dashboard in time to the gunshot drumbeat of Charlie Watts. We drove past the parched fields by the sea that looked like they would catch fire if someone so much as uttered a word out of place.

The Stones are one of my very few favourite bands although I don’t listen to anything they’ve done since 1974, as it lacks the raw beauty of their first decade. But I’ve got most of what they did before then on CD in the Defender, if need be. And it was ‘Satisfaction’ that got me hooked on them when I first heard it as a teenager, half a century ago when I was Giovanni Maria’s age, at a burger joint on the King’s Road with my mother.

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