All hail the Italians and their peppery desserts

‘The pernicious charm of Italy”, EM Forster called it in his comedy of manners, A Room

with a View. He came, he saw; Florence conquered. It’s a familiar tale for English people down the ages. Keats, Shelley, Byron, Browning: the romantics all went to the land of lemon trees (Goethe, vielen Dank) before buttoned-up Forster, and they were also spellbound.

“A beaker full of the warm South.” Keats’s line has become a cliché. Yet we recognise it for a good reason. The attraction of opposites, if you like. Not all English people are buttonedup. Not all Italians put pepper on their strawberries. But there’s something in the difference, and that’s a good place to start.

You mean you haven’t had pepper on your strawberries? Until this week, in a trattoria a stone’s throw from the Arno, neither had I. Now you feel such a fool if you don’t. Taken with pineapple and lemon ice cream there’s really nothing finer, apart from eating ham and eggs in Carolina. With spring in the air it’s a good time to sing the praises of a land – a nation, if you like, though many Italians would not recognise the term – which continues to entrance northern Europeans. For here you will find true European culture, untouched by the bureaucratic defilement of the past half century. The Europe of Dante, Michaelangelo and Galileo, who would have told Brussels what they could do with their blue and yellow flag. Dante and Michaelangelo died in exile, having refused to make their peace with Florence, the city that claims them as kinsmen. Galileo was tried for heresy. Bolshies, every one! Natural Brexiteers! A jest, you pofaced Remainers!

If there is a genius of the spirit then the Italians have it. And it will exist 500 years from now, just as it existed (and thank the Lord it did) 500 years ago. It is most obvious in a city like Florence, the cradle of the Renaissance, but it is evident in the quotidian life of the people. There is a quality of living here that has little to do with money or status, though those things cannot be denied, and everything to do with the real stuff of life.

The Italians, to be honest, are not very good at politics. Anthony Burgess, the novelist whose centenary we celebrate this year, lived in Rome, where he felt comfortable.

The Romans, he wrote, had endured one thousand years of bad government – and looked forward to one thousand more.

What goes for Rome goes for all Italy. These are people who do not see the world in political terms. Nor are they great Catholics, except in the widest cultural sense. Romans, to mention those disputatious folk again, are the least pious citizens in the Roman empire.

Yet there is here an unsurpassed ease in the face of beauty. Whether or not people are believers in a doctrinal sense, there is in Italy a belief in the immortality of the soul. If you are surrounded by beauty, as so many Italians are, it tends to encourage contemplation of the infinite.

But they are also earthbound. They may not be the most tolerant people – the Milanese look down upon the Tuscans, who look down upon everybody – but they are tolerant of human frailty. Nothing human surprises them. And as that last great chorus from Verdi’s

reminds us, he who laughs last laughs loudest. That surely is true tolerance.

Life is essentially comic, the Italians say. Even in their serious moments there is a sense of the fleetingness of things. We live, and we savour life as it is granted to us. It’s not a bad way to see the world.

On Thursday night, in Piazza di Santa Maria Novella, a group of 30 young Italians gathered voluntarily to sing songs. They had lovely clear voices. There was no bawling or shouting, and no drunkenness. They all, men and women, knew the words and sang them without selfconsciousness or false emotion. It was very touching.

Once again some words of Anthony Burgess came to mind. In England, he said, art “turns no wheels; it bakes no bread”. That’s not quite right, but you know what he means. Many English people do not feel at ease in the face of beauty. They feel embarrassed, or even hostile.

My word, how much we can learn from these excitable people!