La dolce vita goes on in the face of death

Italy is in agony but expats will always adore its beauty – and its songs, says Mary Kenny

- Mary Kenny

‘Everyone loves Italy – isn’t that so?

During recent events, I observed a wave – many waves – of Italophilia on social media and elsewhere. Lots of postings of ‘We love Italy’, ‘We stand by Italy’ and ‘Cheers for Italy!’, along with a heartwarming illustration of a young woman lovingly cuddling a map of that boot-shaped peninsula in her arms.

This Italian fandom has deep roots in English (and northern European) culture. Whenever a poet, writer or artist got a bit depressed in their own part of the world – Ibsen in Norway, Goethe in Germany, the Brownings, Elizabeth and Robert, in England – they’d take the road to Italy.

True, there were occasional bouts of homesickness, as when Robbie Browning yearned to be in England now that April was there. Yet the romantic attachment to Italy persisted, what with Keats and Shelley, and then aesthetes such as Walter Pater and John Addington Symonds discovering the Italian Renaissance.

Englishwomen were named ‘Florence’ because their parents were so smitten with the place, as were Miss Nightingale’s (as Mark Bostridge explains on page 18).

Brexit has come and gone, but Italophilia endures. Sympathetic feelings have been enhanced, of course, by Italy’s bad luck during recent events, and there has been international applause for the Italian impetus to burst into song from their balconies during these trials.