Free Here and There by A. A. Gill Page A

ultimate holiday destination.
    Someone once said that to be born Italian and male was to have won first prize in the lottery of life. I think it was me. I seem to remember that I added a caveat to the encomium – that to be born Italian and a woman was to have pulled a position between a fish and a dog from life’s tombola. Italian men have gilded existences in direct proportion to their women’s sullied ones. One of the reasons women have such a dowdy time in Italy is because Italian men are so much better at being women than they are. There is, beyond the Alps, that magical formula for being a properly masculine big girl.
    Italian men shop better than most women. They care more about their appearance, their hair, their nails and the thread-count of sheets. Italian men have an unnatural affinity with cashmere. They’re the only subspecies of bipedal hominid who can wear a pale pink v-neck sweater draped over their shoulders and go out in public, without it being part of some cruel dare or bet. They have apparently cracked the great mating conundrum, the design fault of mankind: how on earth do you have all the fun of being a bloke, with all the emotional range of being a bird? Italian men are able to talk on mobile phones for up to an hour. Not only is that way longer than any other style of man on the planet, it’s longer than penguins can hold their breath underwater. Not only that, but they can do it while talking to other men.
    I once wrote an article pointing out that the reason Northern European women loved Italian men was because it was like having a girlfriend with a willy. Which, incidentally, is why Italian women get such a hard time from them. It was a light-hearted, affectionate article, but it was noticed by the Italian press, who paraphrased it with infuriated exclamation marks, and a TV chat show called me and said they would fly me to Rome for the weekend and pay me a few hundred million lire if they could interview me. Fine. So I went.
    The Maurizio Costanzo Show is a bit of an Italian institution and it’s recorded in front of a large audience in a theatre. So, Maurizio asked, what did I mean by impugning the masculinity of Italian men? I smiled – a winningly Stilton grin, because obviously this was light-hearted joshing – and told him that, as we spoke, the European soccer cup was being played in England, and that the only national team that had made an official complaint were the Italians, who had wailed that there weren’t hair dryers in their dressing rooms. I looked at the audience and waited for the chuckles of recognition and the guffaws of self-deprecation. Silence. And 2000 people stared back at me with a collective ‘and your point is?’ expression.
    Naturally the Italian men would complain that there were no hair dryers. Look at their hair. They had beautiful hair. It was a national treasure. And it was typical that the English, a cold philistine nation that fried fish in pastry and cut their hair with breadknives because the bread was already sliced, were too uncivilised to put hair dryers in dressing rooms. And what about the foot spas and manicure sets? It was at this moment, wallowing in the hostile Latin embrace, that I realised another great truth about Italians of all genders. They have absolutely no sense of humour.
    After the show, we went and had dinner and I walked through the city. It was summer, and it was warm and clear. I’d never really been to Rome before. I’d been to Italy dozens of times, flown into Rome and driven out. I’d been saving the Eternal City for a special occasion. We walked through a series of opera sets. One square led into another like scene changes. We went to a party in a palazzo that had been built by Michelangelo. They all spoke Italian and wore cashmere sweaters over their shoulders, so I stared out the window at the frieze of black cypresses, cupolas, domes and columns silhouetted against the navy