What have Whitney Houston, the parish priest of Cropani and traffic jams got in common? Easy. They are all stones, some sparkling and some less so, in the glittering mosaic that is the Italian summer. In the land of paparazzi, it is hard to believe that an international star as big as Afro-American singer and actress Houston could pass by unnoticed. Yet she dropped into a hospital on the famous Isle of Capri on Monday without as much as a camera click.
True enough, she did arrive wearing sunglasses and with a towel wrapped around her head, making identification difficult. Furthermore, she did not hang around after a visit to the casualty ward.
Ms Houston is currently on a Mediterranean cruise, and, like thousands of other tourists, opted to visit Capri, just off the coast south of Naples. While bathing near there, she apparently cut her face on some rocks. Hence, the rushed visit to hospital for emergency repairs of the no-scar, plastic surgery kind. It was only when she filled out some forms after treatment that her identity emerged. By then she was already on her way back to her luxury yacht.
Whitney Houston's Mediterranean holiday and her small accident serve as a reminder of the problems faced at this time of year by Italy's island resorts, tourist destinations which for 10 months of the year are practically deserted but which find their populations trebled or quadrupled in the months of July and August.
This is an annual invasion which represents life's blood for tourist operators but which causes huge problems for resorts which often do not have the necessary infrastructure to deal with increased amounts of rubbish, traffic chaos (boats and cars) and increased water consumption.
Beauty spots such as Capri, Ischia, Ventotene, Ponza, the Aeolian Islands, Elba and Ustica (to name just the most obvious) have all this summer resorted to different measures to protect themselves.
Capri has limited tourist numbers to 8,500 per week, while Ventotene limits cars to just one hour on the road before and after the ferries dock.
Even the little harbour of Ginostra, on the Aeolian island of Stromboli north of Sicily, currently bears the summer's scars with a mountain of black plastic bags to greet tourists on the quayside. The refuse is awaiting transportation to the mainland.
There are, however, some local authorities which would like to have these problems. Take Cropani, on the eastern Calabrian coast in the Gulf of Squillace. Calabria is Italy's poorest region, infamous for being mafia-infested and generally not enjoying a good reputation among Italians. Keen to promote a positive image of their medieval town, the citizens of Cropani latched onto the chance to stage a regional round of the nationwide Miss Italia beauty queen competition. Anxious to add an air of respectability and dignity to the occasion, the mayor, Mr Pasquale Capellupo, asked the parish priest, Father Francesco Critelli, to chair the competition jury. Deep in the heart of Calabria, it seems, the ways of fulfilling your pastoral mission are indeed infinite.
The need to aggressively promote your tourist product comes as no surprise to Assoturismo, the association of tourist operators, which this week predicted a 1.9 per cent drop in native tourist numbers in Italy.
Given that Italians represent 80 per cent of the entire tourist market in Italy, the drop (at a time when foreign numbers may be down by 6.2 per cent) is not insignificant.
Assoturismo also released another revealing statistic this week, pointing out that 49.8 per cent of Italians take their holidays in houses owned either by themselves or relatives. Which is merely to state the obvious - in Italy the second, third or fourth family house (usually for holiday and weekend purposes) is about as normal as a second or third family car (or mobile phone).
That national enthusiasm for cars, too, may be having a negative effect on this year's tourist trade. The Nielsen research institute calculates that 55 per cent of Italians have significantly less disposable income this year, largely because so many of them opted to take advantage of government incentives to change their used car for a new one (1997 car sales are so far more than double those of 1996).
Now that the family has its new car, let us hope that Daddy remembered to get it complete with air conditioning, necessary for sitting out the 15km to 20km traffic jams (in an average 33 degrees heat) that were already forming last week on most coastal routes.
More seriously, too, let us hope that the new car drivers avoid the kind of carnage that saw 47 people killed on Italian roads in three days last weekend.
As for myself, I am off to water the parched garden. The long, hot summer continues.