Dante’s Beach, Ravenna

It is raining at last, thank God, and the sound of thunder cascades across the heavens like some kind of conversation. This infernally hot summer is drawing to a close. The swallows left last week for sub-Saharan Africa, the bee-eaters the week before. Even the nudists – well, most of them – are going away, back to Amsterdam, Düsseldorf, Bologna and Milan.

Yet I dread, as we slide inexorably once more towards winter, not the ghost-town reality of a tourist village out of season, but the deep cold and the dense fog to come like the ghost of the sea. I always wonder at this time of year: will I be granted one more summer?

How did it ever happen that I ended up here in Italy like a gypsy or an imam as the father of six children? The story began when after graduation I went to Puglia in the deep south to teach English and fell in love for the first time in my life, with a girl called Anna, whose father was dead but whose uncle asked me over Sunday lunch: ‘What are your intentions?’ She was not allowed out after 11 p.m. and had rows with her mother.

We split up after a year or so, thanks largely to my morbid jealousy because she was beautiful and much sought after and I could not cope. I went back to Britain in a desolate mood and left behind my MV Agusta 350 motorbike with drop handlebars. But........

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