Rome - Anthropologists speak of the “transhumance”, the seasonal movements of nomadic shepherds.
Few of us now travel with our livestock, but the need to shift ground is fundamental: recreational travel is, science will one day confirm, the survival of a basic instinct.
It certainly is with me. I performed my annual transhumance from London to a neglected part of Chianti, although these things are relative.
Here, a pair of delightful Maremmano sheepdogs, the ancient cane da pastore, damagingly chewed my new Tim Parks. I had packed his Literary Tour of Italy to give my spectacular idleness a faint gloss of erudition, a project nullified by the dogs’ appetites.
I have never made much distinction between work and play, thinking the notion of “holiday” a bit lowbrow, but there are nonetheless periods when you are indubitably doing nothing. This was one of them.
I spent a lot of time musing about what exactly we love about Italy.
The area south of Florence has awful weather. The Arno valley is a crucible for biblical thunderstorms. And Florence can be a forbidding and calculating place, as you might expect of a city created by bankers.
Even the most sophisticated Florentines sometimes neglect charm: in the glorious Brancacci Chapel, Pietro Torrigiani thumped Michelangelo and broke his nose when he thought he was being upstaged in his art.
So much, then, for Renaissance serenity.
And if you had serenity, when precisely would it degenerate into tedium? I ask myself this every time I see the gracious girl behind the counter at the pasticceria. Like that character in an Elena Ferrante novel, she will spend her life in the shop. Her mating options are contained in a shallow gene pool. I think frustration is everywhere.
Take the winery that offers a “wine experience”. The real experience is a broken chest freezer in the vineyard, a derelict backhoe loader in the white road and a plump, sweaty contadino offering a few broken supermercato biscuits with the tasting. But his rosato is shockingly delicious, even if its infantile label with a pink rose would discredit the advertising profession. You forgive.
We drove back to Milan in the worst weather I have seen, so the extravagantly revamped Gallia Hotel was a welcome oasis. It is superlatively comfortable and reassuringly expensive. Then there were awful delays at Linate because Gatwick had weather as bad as Florence’s, so it was a relief eventually to be back on the train to Victoria.
And then, thinking Balham is as ugly as the back of a fridge, you remember. The solemn beauty of the Borgo San Jacopo at dusk after a shower, the mesmerically well-mannered order of the Tuscan landscape, the butcher’s sublime sausages, espresso as good as you have ever tasted, served in a hellish Autogrill.
I am wondering how soon we can go back. Whatever it is I love about Italy is experienced as much a sense of loss felt near Balham as a presence felt near Impruneta. Something is missing. I am exactly the same as the girl in the pasticceria.
The Independent on Sunday