ROME LETTER:A FUNNY thing happened the other night on my way to a football match – it rained. This was the first rain in these parts for more than three months and, as always in September, it signals a definitive "summer's end" not to say the beginning of an autumn, which, politically at least, looks like it will be just as long and hot as the summer.
Even if I have lived here for 20 years and more, I can never quite get used to the end of summer. Is the season of shorts and sandals, of barbecues on the beach, of an unending Agnew-war on mosquitoes and of vital plant and lawn watering, is it really over?
There are those, such as the baroness herself, who long for the end of the heat. As a boy from Kilrea, with (possibly warped) memories of wet Irish summers, I never long for such a thing.
Indeed, I would be quite happy if the heat went on all year round.
This summer, however, there were a few moments when the heat took on a definitively menacing mien. It was while painting the garden furniture on a blistering afternoon, happy to have emptied the old head of all the various vicissitudes of modern Italy, that I noticed something was afoot.
There was a loud popping and crackling that managed to make itself heard even over the iPod headphones.
This is not a good summer noise. Sure enough, when I downed the paintbrush to examine the source, all my worst fears were confirmed. A fierce fire was blazing just a kilometre down the (very dry and very wooded) hill. For a while, things looked so bad that the baroness decided we had better be ready to abandon ship. If you have maybe five to 10 minutes to get out because of an oncoming forest fire, what do you take with you? The answer is easy – you move the car, you pack in two PCs, two mobiles, two wallets, some clean laundry and you’re ready to run. There is no time for anything else.
In the end, of course, it was a false alarm. When we rang the fire service, they already knew all about it. Within a short while, fire brigades were on the spot and had the fire under control. Next day in the village, people said that it had simply been the work of an arsonist. Almost no one in the village believes that a fire begins “accidentally” – it is always either the work of an arsonist or, more often, of someone keen to use fire as a radical method of cleaning up a particular patch of land.
As one prepares for the autumn, we can gratefully report that this summer as well as providing heat and fire alarms, did provide some moments of spiritual solace. For a start, there was the visit of the St Alfege, Greenwich church choir which features, among other things, my brother Dermot, and which is brilliantly led by choirmaster Steve Dagg.
Listening to the choir sing Scarlatti’s Stabat Mater on a sweltering hot Trevignano night that had many of the ladies furiously waving their fans, it was hard not to reflect that this was a very northern European business really. (Don’t worry, I do know Scarlatti was Italian, born in Naples in 1685.) This was about a whole, huge (more than 60 strong) amateur group of people willing to labour long and hard for the love of music (and a good summer break, of course) and in the process producing a spectacularly professional result.
The group even featured a distinguished organ builder, John Mander, who had driven all the way from London with a terrific (and rather heavy) portable church organ he had built himself. Another extraordinary moment this summer was a return visit to Piero Della Francesco’s Legend of the True Cross in the Basilica of San Francesco in Arezzo. Some 18 years ago, I was one of a group of foreign journalists invited to inspect ongoing restoration work on what experts tend to consider the greatest of all Renaissance fresco cycles.
Through the mists of time, I remember climbing a scaffolding to look at the restoration work close up, in the process marvelling at the ability of anyone to paint on such a grand scale on what is, after all, a freshly (fresco) plastered wall.
Earthquakes, fires, lightning, Napoleon’s troops and at least one disastrous church reconstruction have all taken their toll, yet the frescoes are still there, hauntingly still and spiritual.
Lest I was going to forget where I live though, I received a welcome invitation from the Partito Democratico (PD) to attend their annual summer festa, held this year in Genoa.
Here I was called on to contribute to a debate on “Justice” in Italy. I found myself on the platform with, among others, Raffaele Cantone, a 46-year-old Naples-born magistrate who has successfully carried out a number of investigations into the Camorra, the Neapolitan Mafia that features so large in Roberto Saviano’s best-seller, Gomorra.
Inevitably, the Camorra do not much like magistrate Cantone who for the last six years or so has lived with a police escort.
Walking to dinner with him after the debate along the splendid quaysides of Genoa port restored by architect Renzo Piano, it was hard not to notice the police cars trundling along at a respectable distance in front and behind us.
When the magistrate sat down to dinner, so too, at another strategically placed table, did his six-man escort. The fight against organised crime in Italy is deadly serious.
Still, as we brace ourselves for winter and autumn awaiting the latest developments in modern Italy, I will think back cheerfully to Scarlatti, Piero Della Francesco and, above all, the heat. Until next summer.