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

blue sky, and I smelled the evening pines, wine and the dust of ages, and listened to the mopeds and the tinny hee-haw of Fiat police cars and the incessant babble of Italians talking on mobile phones.
    I knew in that moment two things: one, that the reason Italians don’t have a sense of humour is because they don’t need one. The point of jokes and having a laugh is to cheer yourself up, to make a miserable life a little better. If you live in Wigan, you need a sense of humour. Italian men don’t need to swap jokes because they are already quite happy being Italian men. What Italians have instead of jokes is a boundless, inexhaustible sense of fun. All the things that made you chuckle before you could walk continue to make an Italian laugh until he dies. Italians love to tickle each other. You’ll see middle-aged men in business suits tickling each other in the street and squirming happily. They also pinch, slap, ruffle, chuck and talk in falsetto voices. It makes them happy.
    The second thing I realised was that, from now on, every year that I didn’t spend some time in Rome would be wasted, and if I were allowed only one more trip to one more place in my life, it would be here, without a second thought. All the other options – the magic places, beaches, cities, mountains, deserts, rivers, cottages, palaces and sandcastles – faded in comparison to Rome. It isn’t just the beauty and the grandeur; it’s the depth, the great experience of it. Rome knows more than any other place on earth. The word ‘civilisation’ shares a latin root with ‘civic’ – meaning city. This is the city that invented, grew and exported Western civilisation. And 2500 years later, it’s still effortlessly the best at it. And thank God (who also lives here) it’s looked after by the Italians. Imagine if Rome were a German city, or Hungarian, French, or Austrian? It nearly happened.
    The next morning, standing in the Piazza Navona with a Roman friend, I asked dreamily: Why doesn’t everyone live here? A millennium ago, the whole Western world dreamed of living in Rome. We could do it now. Why don’t we all move here? Why don’t we all have our offices in Rome?
    Ah, he said, arranging his powder-pink cashmere sweater and regarding his reflection in a shop window, we thought of this. It is impossible. For starters, you need a miracle to get a phone connected here. To get a fax, you need to be the Pope, and even God can’t get broadband. Nobody could do business in Rome. Scuzi … and he answered his mobile.

Shore thing
    Most travel writers can’t stand them, but beaches provide the most soulful experience you can find this side of the grave.
    One of the very few things that all travel writers hold in common is an effete disdain of beaches. We don’t do seaside, unless it’s ironic or nostalgic. Beaches are for holidays, and travel writers don’t do holidays. Holidays are for amateurs, pedestrians. A beach is a sandpit for grown-ups. It’s an infantilising experience where the crowds regress through a childish, supine idiocy. On sand a man will wear toddler clothes in colours and patterns that he wouldn’t dream of sporting on tarmac or carpet. You eat and drink stuff that would be disgusting under a roof. You play semi-skilled games, paddle geriatrically and get sunburnt. You stare toothlessly at bosoms and horizons. And all beaches are extensions of the same beach; they have a repetitive primary simplicity. We want them to do the same thing, which is essentially to regress us back to the holidays we remember with the romance of greening home movies.
    Beaches dictate a certain sort of personality, a particular world view. It is, for instance, impossible to be sophisticated on a beach. And as I am prone to fits of meritless sophistication, I’m drawn to the antidote of beaches. Despite the travel writing, I do rather love them.
    My childhood