Milan Italy Quotes

Men of learning in Milan have not enjoyed proper respect. They hid themselves in their laboratories and thought themselves lucky if . . . priests left them alone. All is changed today. Thought in Italy is free. Inquisition, intolerance, despots have vanished. I invite scholars to meet and propose what must be done to give science and the arts a new flowering.

More than one person has claimed that the whole history of Italy as a nation-state could be reconstructed through an account of the country’s railways.

a small nation resembles a big family and likes to describe itself that way. In the language of the smallest European people, in Icelandic, the term for "family" is fjölskylda; the etymology is eloquent: skylda means "obligation"; fjöl means "multiple." Family is thus "a multiple obligation." Icelanders have a single word for "family ties": fjölskyldubönd: "the cords (bönd) of multiple obligations." Thus in the big family that is a small country, the artist is bound in multiple ways, by multiple cords. When Nietzsche noisily savaged the German character, when Stendhal announced that he preferred Italy to his homeland, no German or Frenchman took offense; if a Greek or a Czech dared to say the same thing, his family would curse him as a detestable traitor.

The train ran out into a steep green meadow and Jacob saw striped tulips growing and heard a bird singing, in Italy. There were trees laced together with vines - as Virgil said. Virgil's bees had gone about the plains of Lombardy. It was the custom of the ancients to train vines between elms. Then at Milan there were sharp-winged hawks, of a bright brown, cutting figures over the roofs.

So we had the classic Italian compromise, a theater of strife when all was actually agreed. Anarchy is rare in Italy, but legality is always up for renegotiation, especially if you can present yourself as hard done by,

The pilgrimage of Italy, which I now accomplished, had long been the object of my curious devotion. The passage of Mount Cenis, the regular streets of Turin, the Gothic cathedral of Milan, the scenery of the Boromean Islands, the marble palaces of Genoa, the beauties of Florence, the wonders of Rome, the curiosities of Naples, the galleries of Bologna, the singular aspect of Venice, the amphitheatre of Verona, and the Palladian architecture of Vicenza, are still present to my imagination. I read the Tuscan writers on the banks of the Arno; but my conversation was with the dead rather than the living, and the whole college of Cardinals was of less value in my eyes than the transfiguration of Raphael, the Apollo of the Vatican, or the massy greatness of the Coliseum. It was at Rome, on the fifteenth of October, 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted fryars were singing Vespers in the temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the City first started to my mind. After Rome has kindled and satisfied the enthusiasm of the Classic pilgrim, his curiosity for all meaner objects insensibly subsides.

Now, my all-time favorite accolade from a book reviewer was when Fernanda Pivano, Italy’s best-known critic, wrote in a leading Italian newspaper that “Tom Robbins is the most dangerous writer in the world.” I never read my reviews, even in English, but others sometimes pass choice bits along, so when I had occasion to meet the legendary Signora Pivano at a reception in Milan, I asked her what she meant by that wonderfully flattering remark. She replied, “Because you are saying zat love is zee only thing that matters and everything else eese a beeg joke.” Well, being uncertain, frankly, that is what I’d been saying, I changed the subject and inquired about her recent public denial that she’d ever gone to bed with Ernest Hemingway, whom she’d shown around Italy in the thirties. “Why didn’t you sleep with Hemingway?” I inquired. Signora Pivano sighed, closed her large brown eyes, shook her gray head, and answered in slow, heavily accented English, “I was a fool.” Okay, back to the New York Cinematheque. Why did I choose to go watch a bunch of jerky, esoteric, often self-indulgent 16mm movies rather than sleep with the sexy British actress? Move over, Fernanda, there’s room for two fools on your bus.

In the Village III Who has removed the typewriter from my desk, so that I am a musician without his piano with emptiness ahead as clear and grotesque as another spring? My veins bud, and I am so full of poems, a wastebasket of black wire. The notes outside are visible; sparrows will line antennae like staves, the way springs were, but the roofs are cold and the great grey river where a liner glides, huge as a winter hill, moves imperceptibly like the accumulating years. I have no reason to forgive her for what I brought on myself. I am past hating, past the longing for Italy where blowing snow absolves and whitens a kneeling mountain range outside Milan. Through glass, I am waiting for the sound of a bird to unhinge the beginning of spring, but my hands, my work, feel strange without the rusty music of my machine. No words for the Arctic liner moving down the Hudson, for the mange of old snow moulting from the roofs. No poems. No birds.

My son is the man who is handing his passport to the policeman. My son is the policeman who is receiving the passport. My son is the old man in front of me in the queue, here, in the air-port, in Beijing. Over the last twelve months, I have been seeing the face of my son in the faces of all the Chinese people I have happened to meet. I was walking in Milan, Italy, when Laura called me and told me that our application had been finally sent to China. We would be receivinga son or a daughter from China. I was excited. I put my phone into my jacket pocket and slowed down in the Corso Vittorio Emanuele gallery. There was a multitude of people around me, but I was totally unaware of their existence. I was trying to picture my son’s, or my daughter’s face and hands. I wondered what age he or she was. For a while I kept imagining and reviewing all the possibilities, and all the hypotheses, but I was not able to create an image which would bring an end to my seeking. Then, suddenly, I found him. He was walking in front of me with his wife and little daughter. I was not sure about his origin, if he were truly Chinese or not, but it was definitely him. He was a little younger than I. I was happy to see he was so distinguished, with his gold-rimmed glasses and nicely ironed, blue shirt.

Attempting to escape across the Swiss border on 26 April 1945, Mussolini and his mistress Clara Petacci, her brother Marcello and fifteen others were captured by the Italian partisans. On Saturday the 28th Mussolini and Petacci were executed by sub-machine gun in front of a low stone wall by the gates of a villa outside the village of Giulino di Mezzegra on Lake Como, one of the loveliest beauty-spots in Italy. (It seems rather unItalian to murder an attractive and apolitical mistress, but such is war.) Their bodies were added to those of the other captured Fascists, loaded in to a removal van and driven to Milan, the birthplace of Fascism. There, the corpses of Mussolini and Petacci were kicked, spat upon, shot at and urinated over, and then hung upside-down from a metal girder in front of the petrol station in the Piazzale Loreto, with their names on pieces of paper pinned to their feet.

The method of addition is quite charming if it involves adding to the self such things as a cat, a dog, roast pork, love of the sea or of cold showers. But the matter becomes less idyllic if a person decides to add love for communism, for the homeland, for Mussolini, for Roman Catholicism or atheism, for fascism or anti-fascism. In both cases the method remains exactly the same: a person stubbornly defending the superiority of cats over other animals is doing basically the same thing as one who maintains that Mussolini was the sole saviour of Italy: he is proud of this attribute of the self and he tries to make this attribute (a cat or Mussolini) acknowledged and loved by everyone. Here is that strange paradox to which all people cultivating the self by way of the addition method are subject: they use addition in order to create a unique, inimitable self, yet because they automatically become propagandists for the added attributes, they are actually doing everything in their power to make as many others as possible similar to themselves; as a result, their uniqueness (so painfully gained) quickly begins to disappear.

The DUCE diverted funds intended for the Fiume adventure, and used them for His own election campaign. He was arrested for the illegal possession of arms, sent parcel bombs to the Archbishop of Milan and its mayor, and after election was, as is well-known, responsible for the assassination of Di Vagno and Matteoti. Since then He has been responsible for the murders of Don Mizzoni Amendola, the Rosselli brothers, and the journalist Piero Gobetti, quite apart from the hundreds who have been the victims of His squadistri in Ferrara, Ravenna and Trieste, and the thousands who have perished in foreign places whose conquest was useless and pointless. We Italians remain eternally grateful for this, and consider that so much violence has made us a superior race, just as the introduction of revolvers into Parliament and the complete destruction of constitutional democracy have raised our institutions to the greatest possible heights of civilisation. Since the illegal seizure of power, Italy has known an average of five acts of political violence per diem, the DUCE has decreed that 1922 is the new Annus Domini, and He was pretended to be a Catholic in order to dupe the Holy Father into supporting Him against the Communists, even though He really is one Himself. He has completely suborned the press by wrecking the premises of dissident newspapers and journals. In 1923 he invaded Corfu for no apparent reason, and was forced to withdraw by the League of Nations. In 1924 He gerrymandered the elections, and He has oppressed minorities in the Tyrol and the North-East. He sent our soldiers to take part in the rape of Somalia and Libya, drenching their hands in the blood of innocents, He has doubled the number of the bureaucracy in order to tame the bourgeoisie, He has abolished local government, interfered with the judiciary, and purportedly has divinely stopped the flow of lava on Mt Etna by a mere act of will. He has struck Napoleonic attitudes whilst permitting Himself to be used to advertise Perugina chocolates, He has shaved his head because He is ashamed to be seen to be going bald, He has been obliged to hire a tutor to teach Him table manners, He has introduced the Roman salute as a more hygienic alternative to the handshake, He pretends not to need spectacles, He has a repertoire of only two facial expression, He stands on a concealed podium whilst making speeches because He is so short, He pretends to have studied economics with Pareto, and He has assumed infallibility and encouraged the people to carry His image in marches, as though He were a saint. He is a saint, of course. He has (and who are we to disagree?) declared Himself greater than Aristotle, Kant, Aquinas, Dante, Michelangelo, Washington, Lincoln, and Bonaparte, and He has appointed ministers to serve Him who are all sycophants, renegades, racketeers, placemen, and shorter than He is. He is afraid of the Evil Eye and has abolished the second person singular as a form of address. He has caused Toscanini to be beaten up for refusing to play 'Giovinezza', and He has appointed academicians to prove that all great inventions were originally Italian and that Shakespeare was the pseudonym of an Italian poet. He has built a road through the site of the forum, demolishing fifteen ancient churches, and has ordered a statue of Hercules, eighty metres high, which will have His own visage, and which so far consists of a part of the face and one gigantic foot, and which cannot be completed because it has already used up one hundred tons of metal.

With its street crime, prostitutes, and drug dealers, Milan was second only to Naples as the seediest city in Italy.

Thomas Edison hailed him as the "genius of the modern age”; Gandhi, as a “superman.” Winston Churchill pledged to stand by him in his “struggle against the bestial appetites of Leninism.” Newspapers in Rome, host to the Vatican, referred to him as “the incarnation of God.” In the end, people who had worshipped [Benito Mussolini's] every move hung his corpse upside down next to his mistress’s near a gas station in Milan.

It’s not on any map, but it’s there. It’s invisible, but there it is. A barrier that makes the memory of the Berlin Wall look ridiculous: raised to separate those who have from those who need, it divides the globe into north and south, and draws borders within each country and within each city. When the south of the world commits the affront of scaling the walls and venturing where it shouldn’t, the north reminds it, with truncheons, of its proper place. And the same thing happens to those who attempt to leave the zones of the damned in each country and each city. Football, mirror of everything, reflects this reality. In the middle of the 1980s, when Napoli started playing the best football in Italy thanks to the magical influx of Maradona, fans in the north of the country reacted by unsheathing the old weapons of scorn. Neapolitans, usurpers of prohibited glory, were snatching trophies from the ever powerful, and it was time to punish the insolence of the intruding scum from the south. In the stadiums of Milan and Turin, banners insulted: ‘Neapolitans, welcome to Italy.’ Or they evoked cruelty: ‘Vesuvius, we’re counting on you.’ And chants that were the children of fear and the grandchildren of racism resounded more loudly than ever: What a stench, the dogs are running, all because the Neapolitans are coming. Oh cholerics buried by quake, you’ve never seen soap, not even a cake, Napoli shit, Napoli cholera, you’re the shame of all Italia.

The Blasters proved to be the most prominent and popular of these acts by far. Originally a quartet, the band was bred in Downey, just down the freeway from East L.A. In their teens, brothers Phil and Dave Alvin were bitten by the blues bug; they became habitués of the L.A. club the Ash Grove, where many of the best-known folk and electric blues performers played, and they sought out the local musicians who could teach them their craft, learning firsthand from such icons as Big Joe Turner, T-Bone Walker, and Little Richard’s saxophonist Lee Allen (who would ultimately join the band in the ’80s). But the Blasters’ style was multidimensional: they could play R&B, they loved country music, and they were also dyed-in-the-wool rockabilly fans who were initially embraced by the music’s fervent L.A. cultists. Their debut album, 1980’s American Music, was recorded in a Van Nuys garage by the Milan, Italy–born rockabilly fanatic Rockin’ Ronnie Weiser, and released on his indie label Rollin’ Rock Records, which also issued LPs by such first-generation rockabilly elders as Gene Vincent, Mac Curtis, Jackie Waukeen Cochran, and Ray Campi. By virtue of Phil Alvin’s powerful, unmannered singing and Dave Alvin’s adept guitar playing and original songwriting, the Blasters swiftly rose to the top of a pack of greasy local bands that also included Levi and the Rockats (a unit fronted by English singer Levi Dexter) and the Rockabilly Rebels (who frequently backed Ray Campi). Los Lobos were early Blasters fans, and often listened to American Music in their van on the way to their own (still acoustic) gigs. Rosas says, “We loved their first record, man. We used to play the shit out of that record. Dave [Hidalgo] was the one who got a copy of it, and he put it on cassette.

The actual antecedents of contemporary populist politicians like Trump are to be found not in interwar Central European totalitarian states but in state and local politics, particularly urban politics. In Europe, pro-Brexit Boris Johnson was the mayor of London before becoming prime minister, and Italy’s Matteo Salvini was on the city council of Milan from 1993 to 2012. In the United States, the shift from post-1945 democratic pluralism to technocratic neoliberalism was fostered from the 1960s onward by an alliance of the white overclass with African Americans and other racial minority groups. The result was a backlash by white working-class voters, not only against nonwhites who were seen as competitors for jobs and housing, but also against the alien cultural liberalism of white “gentry liberals.” The backlash in the North was particularly intense among “white ethnics”—first-, second-, and third-generation white immigrants like Irish, German, Italian, and Polish Americans, many of them Catholic. The disproportionately working-class white ethnics now found themselves defined as bigots by the same white Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) elites who until recently had imposed quotas on Jews and Catholics in their Ivy League universities, but who were now posing as the virtuous, enlightened champions of civil rights. This toxic mix of black aspiration, white ethnic backlash, and WASP condescension provided a ripe habitat for demagogues, many of them old-school Democrats like Frank Rizzo, mayor of Philadelphia, Sam Yorty, mayor of Los Angeles, and Mario Angelo Procaccino, failed mayoral candidate in New York. These populist big-city mayors or candidates in the second half of the twentieth century combined appeals to working-class grievances and resentments with folksy language and feuds with the metropolitan press, a pattern practiced, in different ways, by later New York City mayors Ed Koch, a Democrat, and Rudy Giuliani, a Republican. In its “Against Trump” issue of January 22, 2016, the editors of National Review mocked the “funky outer-borough accents” shared by Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. Indeed, Trump, a “white ethnic” from Queens with German and Scots ancestors, with his support in the US industrial states where working-class non-British European-Americans are concentrated, is ethnically different from most of his predecessors in the White House, whose ancestors were proportionately far more British American. Traits which seem outlandish in a US president would not have seemed so if Trump had been elected mayor of New York. Donald Trump was not Der Führer. He was Da Mayor of America.

While Leonardo lived in Milan, a terrible disease spread through the city, killing thousands of people. Its victims got black spots all over their bodies before they died. People named the disease the black death. Today we call it the bubonic plague. At one time, the plague wiped out about a third of the people in Europe. In Renaissance cities like Milan, sewage ran in the streets. Rats and their fleas were everywhere. Infected fleas bit people and infected them as well. In Italy in the 1600s, doctors wore beaked masks stuffed with herbs they thought would protect them from the plague. We’re not sure if the masks were used in Leonardo’s time. Leonardo knew that Milan was not healthy. So he planned a special city, where people could live better and cleaner lives.

She was preoccupied, though, and explained that she was worried because she could not reach her mother in Milan. She said the region had been “put under lockdown.”31 I remember the sense of vertigo I felt when she said that. What? That could not happen in Italy — in a free, modern nation. I understood that “lockdown,” the holding of citizens against their wishes in one area, the restrictions of their liberty to assemble freely — only happened under totalitarian systems.

DELEGATES AT THE MILAN CONFERENCE IN 1880: HEARING DEAF 163 1 In 1880, educators gathered in Milan, Italy, to discuss the state of deaf education. The delegates had been handpicked by the oralist society sponsoring the conference with the express goal of eliminating manual language from schools. The conference passed eight resolutions, effectively banning signed language from schools for the deaf around the world for about 80 years. Some schools, including the school that would become Gallaudet University, pushed back against the resolutions, but most adopted them.

Most modern scholars now insist that he merely imagined Italy, and that the details he imagined are inaccurate, proof that Shakespeare was never actually there. In The Two Gentlemen of Verona, for instance, he sends the character Valentine from Verona to Milan—two inland cities—by boat. How silly! In fact, the cities of northern Italy were once linked by a network of canals and rivers used frequently by Renaissance merchants and travelers.

Around the time Vespasiano reached his fortieth birthday in 1462, a humanist in Milan wrote that the most beautifully made books came from Florence. “There is one Vespasiano there,” he wrote, “an excellent bookseller, with expert knowledge of both books and scribes, to whom all of Italy and foreigners as well resort when they want to find elegant books for sale.”1 According to one of his scribes, Vespasiano was princeps omnium librariorum florentinorum (prince of Florentine booksellers). One client simply declared him rei de li librari del mondo—king of the world’s booksellers.

Banco Ambrosiano of Milan, Italy’s largest private bank, which was headed by Roberto Calvi.

The ferment and frustration Margaret had witnessed firsthand in both Europe’s workers and the intelligentsia could no longer be contained. Uprisings across the Continent brought a new French republic, the resignation of Austria’s Prince Metternich in Vienna, the separation of Hungary from Austrian rule. There had been popular insurrections in all the states of Germany. Margaret was optimistic that democracy in Italy, where Milan was now “in the hands of my friends”—the young radicals she had met the previous summer—would be achieved without “need to spill much blood.

Football was his passion, his obsession, the thing he knew best, and Serie A was considered the league that practised the most advanced defensive tactics since Sacchi. His Milan of the eighties were regarded as having set the benchmark in terms of work rate and defensive strategy over the previous two decades – and Pep was determined to learn as much as he could from his time in Italy.

On March 23, 1919, one of the most famous socialists in Italy founded a new party, the Fasci di Combattimento, a term that means “fascist combat squad.” This was the first official fascist party and thus its founding represents the true birth of fascism. By the same token, this man was the first fascist. The term “fascism” can be traced back to 1914, when he founded the Fasci Rivoluzionari d’Azione Internazionalista, a political movement whose members called themselves fascisti or fascists. In 1914, this founding father of fascism was, together with Vladimir Lenin of Russia, Rosa Luxemburg of Germany, and Antonio Gramsci of Italy, one of the best known Marxists in the world. His fellow Marxists and socialists recognized him as a great leader of socialism. His decision to become a fascist was controversial, yet he received congratulations from Lenin who continued to regard him as a faithful revolutionary socialist. And this is how he saw himself. That same year, because of his support for Italian involvement in World War I, he would be expelled from the Italian Socialist Party for “heresy,” but this does not mean he ceased to be a socialist. It was common practice for socialist parties to expel dissenting fellow socialists for breaking on some fine point with the party line. This party reject insisted that he had been kicked out for making “a revision of socialism from the revolutionary point of view.”2 For the rest of his life—right until his lifeless body was displayed in a town square in Milan—he upheld the central tenets of socialism which he saw as best reflected in fascism. Who, then, was this man? He was the future leader of fascist Italy, the one whom Italians called Il Duce, Benito Mussolini.

Giovanni always had music running through his head. Moments he experienced in life recalled for him scenes from operas. [Giovanni Tempesta]

He was a throwback to a lady's old romantic notion of how a man should act. [Giovanni Tempesta]

Fascist regimes set out to make the new man and the new woman (each in his or her proper sphere). It was the challenging task of fascist educational systems to manufacture “new” men and women who were simultaneously fighters and obedient subjects. Educational systems in liberal states, alongside their mission to help individuals realize their intellectual potential, were already committed to shaping citizens. Fascist states were able to use existing educational personnel and structures with only a shift of emphasis toward sports and physical and military training. Some of the schools’ traditional functions were absorbed, to be sure, by party parallel organizations like the obligatory youth movements. All children in fascist states were supposed to be enrolled automatically in party organizations that structured their lives from childhood through university. Close to 70 percent of Italians aged six to twenty-one in the northern cities of Turin, Genoa, and Milan belonged to Fascist youth organizations, though the proportion was much lower in the undeveloped south. Hitler was even more determined to take young Germans away from their traditional socializers—parents, schoolteachers, churche —and their traditional spontaneous amusements. “These boys,” he told the Reichstag on December 4, 1938, “join our organization at the age of ten and get a breath of fresh air for the first time; then, four years later, they move from the Jungvolk to the Hitler Youth and there we keep them for another four years. And then we are even less prepared to give them back into the hands of those who create our class and status barriers, rather we take them immediately into the Party, into the Labor Front, into the SA or the SS . . . and so on.”117 Between the end of 1932 and the beginning of 1939, the Hitlerjugend expanded its share of the ten-to-eighteen age group from 1 percent to 87 percent.118 Once out in the world, the citizens of a fascist state found the regime watching over their leisure-time activities as well: the Dopolavoro in Italy and the Kraft durch Freude in Germany.

Hills, Helen. Invisible City: Architecture of Devotion in Seventeenth-Century Neapolitan Convents. Oxford University Press. Hollingsworth, Mary. The Cardinal’s Hat. Profile Books. Horne, P. “Reformation and Counter-Reformation at Ferrara” (essay). Italian Studies, 1958. Hufton, Olwen H, editor. Women in Religious Life. European University Institute. Kendrick, Robert. Celestial Sirens: Nuns and Their Music in Early Modern Milan. Clarendon Press. Laven, Mary. Virgins of Venice. Viking Press. Le Goff, Jacques. The Medieval Imagination. University of Chicago Press. Lowe, Kate. Nuns’ Chronicles and Convent Culture in Renaissance and Counter-Reformation Italy. Cambridge University Press. Maclean, Ian. The Renaissance Notion of Woman. Cambridge University Press.

The holy relics were granted to Rainald von Dassel, Archbishop of Cologne (1159–67), following Emperor Barbarossa’s sacking of the city of Milan. Such a treasure was granted to the German Archbishop for his aid and chancellorship in service to the current Emperor. Not all were content to see such a treasure leave Italy…not without a struggle. —From L’histoire de la Sainte Empire Romaine     (The History of the Holy Roman Empire), 1845,     HISTOIRES LITTÉRAIRES

Soccer is Italy’s favorite sport, and is played and watched all over the country. Each Sunday the great stadiums of Milan, Turin, Naples, Rome, and Bologna are filled with thousands of fans. Italian club soccer teams are among the best in the world, and regularly win international competitions. The national Italian team won soccer’s World Cup in 1982. Wages for successful players are high, and this helps to attract soccer stars from many other countries. Cycling also is very popular, as a sport to both do and watch. The Grand Tour of Italy takes place each year, following a long, grueling course over mountainous country. Many Italians forsake their favorite cafes to watch this bicycle race on television. Other popular pastimes include bowls, a game played on a sanded rink, and card games, commonly seen in cafes and bars across the nation. During August, many businesses close and workers go on vacation to the coast or mountains. The big cities are mostly deserted, except for tourists.

You’ve saved your money and bought a ticket to Fashion Week in Milan. All the world’s great clothing designers will be showing their startling and beautiful designs. You’ll be one of the first to see them! Or picture yourself in Rome. You’re at a performance of the opera Aïda, written by Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi. You’re seated amid eighteen-hundred-year-old ruins under a starry sky, listening to magnificent music. You’ve got your snowboard and warm clothing so you can glide down the slopes the world’s greatest skiers took during the 2006 Winter Olympics near Turin. Or perhaps it’s summer, and you’re going to explore the sea caves of Capri, off the coast of Naples. Later, you can take a look at the towering columns at Agrigento, among the temples the ancient Greeks built on the island of Sicily long before Italy existed. In any one of these places, you might be one of the millions of tourists who visit Italy every year. But alongside the tourists are Italians, also appreciative of the wonders of their own country.

Italy has been a single, united country only since 1870. For many centuries before this, it was a collection of independent “city states.” Each city state was based on a main city, such as Venice, Florence, or Milan, and had its own customs and language. Even today, many people think of themselves first and foremost as Venetians (from Venice), or Florentines, or Sicilians, and only then as Italians.

Milan is Italy’s business hub and crucible of chic. Between

Rome may be bigger and have the political power, but Milan and the affluent north are what really make the country go. It’s

Although Vittorio De Sica was revered as Italy’s great neorealist director (Bicycle Thieves, Miracle in Milan), he had been hired as an actor on A Farewell to Arms. De Sica would receive an Oscar nomination for portraying Major Alessandro Rinaldi, who suffers a breakdown after enduring one too many battlefront horrors. As Hudson remembered it, De Sica’s directorial instincts kicked in at a moment when his guidance was desperately needed. “De Sica was a marvelous man and a hell of a director,” Hudson said.

The volatile politics of Italy acquired additional complications at the end of the fifteenth century. Charles VIII had died in the spring of 1498, leaving as his successor Louis XII, formerly the duke of Valois and Orleans and, through his descent from Valentino Visconti, a claimant to the duchy of Milan. Old treaties were exhumed and new theatres penned, their ultimate effect being to cut Italy to bits.

I have strict ideas, you know, about how a martini should be made. Controversially, I prefer vodka, not gin. It must be ice-cold, and extremely dry. Vermouth originated in Milan; and Noël Coward once famously quipped that the nearest a martini should ever get to vermouth was a wave of the glass in the general direction of Italy. I agree, and I was careful to add only a drop or two, for the merest whisper of vermouth. This was an excellent vermouth, fortunately—French, not Italian—and kept chilled in the fridge, as it should be.