In the 1960’s, a fashionable subject of conversation among the Russian intelligentsia was Mikhail Sholokhov’s plagiarism. Sholokhov, it was alleged, had found the manuscript of And Quiet Flows the Don among the personal effects of a certain Cossack, published it as his own, and eventually pocketed the 1965 Nobel Prize for Literature. Just look at...
A decade ago, Celeste Dell’Anna, to this day the only interior designer in Milan with a world reputation and a beautiful wife, was doing our new house in Knightsbridge. We became great friends, initially because I appreciated the tragic spectacle of this man of culture being baited, like some great white stag personifying the Italian...
It is now Carnival. If you look at Venetian painting, where it is a recurrent theme, very occasionally among the profusion of masks and costumes worn by the revelers you will spot the fool’s cap, the jester’s conical hat decorated with bells or pom-poms. Nowadays, the hat, sold on every street corner in a variety...
A few months ago, when word of an article of mine about the events of September 11 went round the Russian community in London, I received a telephone call inviting me to a private meeting with Boris Berezovsky. (A relevant question to ponder is whether those Westerners who are unfamiliar with the name have somehow...
The only substantive change to my character that I have observed over time is in the workings of the spleen, the abdominal organ once regarded as the seat of what are now called the negative emotions. When I was young, the objects of my hate were precious few, though, of course, I used to fulminate...
When I first clambered onto the Italian carousel, at Piazza della Fontana di Trevi, my impressions were a kind of paean to the seriousness of Roman life. Now, some four years later and roughly 400 kilometers to the south, I find myself in Palermo, marveling at the essential childishness of the people. I dare say...
After almost a century of dealing with international terrorism—since communism, in practice as well as in theory, is hardly anything more complex than terrorism on a global scale—Western democracies should have caught on to the fact that all social movements, particularly those perceived as spontaneous, are invariably organized, manipulated, and directed by those whose interests...
“Before I have my coffee, I want a glass of lemon juice,” I say to the barman. He is out of lemons, which apparently can happen even in Sicily. “Oranges?” Out of oranges, but I suppose this, too, can happen. “What can I get then?” He offers me a lemon granita, made with crushed ice...
“All the cars you see around here,” yet another taxi driver bringing me from the Grand Hotel Villa Igiea to the congested center of town began in a confidential undertone, “it wasn’t always like that, you know. Before, it was all carriages.” Then, after a pause that he reckoned was long enough for the average...
Asked in ever more incredulous tones, the question is warm with sympathy on the lips of friends and cold as Damask steel in the mouths of enemies. “Why Palermo?” One frivolous reply is that, back in Venice, the crab season is now over; the white-sneaker hydra of package tourism is about to hot-millipede it over...
A friend of mine just got arrested for arms dealing. From whom he was buying the arms, to whom he was selling them, or, indeed, whether he ever bought or sold any, I haven’t the slightest idea. But the raid, by the Italian police and intelligence, on Sasha Zhukov’s five-million dollar villa in Piccolo Romazzino,...
I have always wanted to spend some time in Rome, for a whole rosary of personal reasons. As with much else in a person’s private life, to recount these in print is to expose oneself to public ridicule. Yes, Rome is a wonderful city. Yes, the food is good. But then in England, where I...
“So spake the Fiend, and with necessity, The tyrant’s plea, excus’d his devilish deeds.” —Milton, Paradise Lost The locus classicus of all informed discussion on the subject of the political essence of totalitarianism is the following passage from Plato’s Republic: If you are caught committing any of these crimes on a...
I have been a Eurocentric, heterosexual, white male ever since I was a little baby. An unreconstructed Marxist would say that this accident of birth—carelessly amplified of late by the sybaritic sojourn in a palazzo on the Grand Canal whose windows watch the West decline over the campanile of Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari—is what...
Foreigners often think of life in Italy as operatic, which shows that reinvestment in the obvious is not always a losing propostion. If only more foreigners had followed Nietzsche in asking “If it is true that evil men have no songs, how is it that the Russians have songs?” then perhaps the world would not...
Sometimes, though not very often, one has the occasion to discover that, deep down beneath the surface, things are actually better than they seem. Some years ago, when she was unequivocally and irresponsibly young, my English friend Natasha G— came to stay with her godfather, Franco Zeffirelli, at his villa in Positano, where a newly...
There are many conservative, intelligent people who will happily tell you that there is no such thing as the absolute truth of history, only different, mutually complementary versions. History, they will say, is a mutable, fluid continuum, whose multiple truths are constantly undergoing revision and revaluation in one another’s reflected light, as well as in...
After an uninterrupted spell of a winter month or two here in Venice—all footsteps in the evening mist, and quiet conversation about the best way to cook pheasant, and a Neapolitan card game called “seven and a half—what one notices on arriving in London is the way women move. First of all, it’s the speed....
Giovanni and I were both in Milan for the day, and he asked me to join him for lunch at Bice with a friend of his, Lauren Bacall. The expensive restaurant was quite empty, we drank a good bit, and the conversation ranged from the actress’s favorite New Yorker cartoon to the particulars of life...
The first chill of autumn, which reminds us locals to order firewood from the mainland for our illegal fireplaces, is always a moment of reckoning. Not for nothing does the Russian Aesop, Krylov, in his fable of the socially responsible ant and the bohemian dragonfly, suggest that such a moment has arrived when a wintry...
Among the unaccountable peculiarities of this diary, and indeed of my general wav of seeing things, is that one can never expect to learn something of Capri from my impressions of Capri. And yet, I keep asking as though to placate myself, why should it be otherwise? I am aboard the Stamos with a group...
I start this story not at my own desk in the Palazzo Mocenigo, but in a hammock suspended between two graceful pine trees in a place called Oliveto, up in the Sabine Hills, an hour’s drive from Rome. The settlement of a dozen houses is dominated by the Villa Parisi, a medieval casale set in...
The photographs were commissioned by a music company for the cover of Andrea Bocelli’s next cult album. The last one had sold five million copies. We were visiting the popular tenor at his house in the resort of Forte dei Marmi, and decided to spend a few days at one of the town’s innumerable beach...
As the book’s title has all the lyric delicacy of a Rolex advertising campaign, and as we quickly discover that its author is neither a philosopher nor a watchmaker, it becomes clear at the outset that what we are up against is the most irritating of genres, popular science. In Mr. Waugh’s defense, I hasten...
Summer in Venice means tourists. Do I hate them? No more, I assure you, than a patient stricken with a mortal illness hates the individual viral agents, or virions, which are draining the nucleic-synthesizing energy of his body cells to replicate themselves. He hates the disease, which is making him weak, old, and ugly even...
I live in Italy—in Venice, which I have on occasion described as Italy’s Italy—for the deceptively simple reason that it is the only place in the world where I do not feel the urge to play roulette after dinner. I have actually thought long and hard about this opening sentence of mine, trying to decide...
I now want to add another likeness to my Gogolian gallery of Venice’s living souls. If this continuing series should start to take on the blurry aspect of a spinning carousel, becoming a kind of soap opera of fleeting impressions, all I can say in my defense is that the development is an intended one,...
A couple of months ago, I was in Milan for an “Homage to Giorgio Strehler” at the Teatro alla Scala. This was Mozart’s Don Giovanni, conducted by Riceardo Muti and wifli a cast that, at least to my unspoiled ears, represented the sort of perfection that one only reads about, ruefully, in yellowed reviews of...
Last year, when I first came to live here—as bearer of the Carta Venezia, the photo ID which entitles the city resident to buy water-bus tickets at 75 cents instead of the tourist’s three dollars, I have every right to say “live” rather than “visit—I made a private pact with Neptune and the spirits of...
“No evil is greater than anarchy.” —A Latin Proverb With author’s fees in eight figures and print runs to match, Thomas Harris’s cannibal is what publishers call a phenomenon. “I should’ve written that!” agonize America’s ambitious housewives on their way to becoming failed writers. “I can’t believe that this is what...
What Exile from himself can flee? To Zones, though more and more remote, Still, still pursues, where-e’er I be. The blight of life—the demon, Thought. —Lord Byron Thus a previous occupant of our palazzo. Romantic rubbish, you say? Venice not remote enough for him? Should have tried some other zone, freezing rain in October and...
Last spring, in one of my early letters from Venice, I promised that I would write in greater detail about Baron F—, who liberated me from Florentine bondage by letting me the attico at Corte Tron, with its lifesaving terrace looking over the courtyard of the Palazzo Volpi and beyond, to the motionless cranes over...
I have always disbelieved those who would argue that the topography of a country, that is to say its purely geophysical characteristics, is dominant in the shaping of the personality of its people. Stalin used to call them vulgarizers of Marxism and shoot them, but we in the West may simply murmur that they exaggerate...
I must write something about the man from Los Angeles who has come to stay, which is awkward for two reasons. One problem is that bashing the Ugly American is a cliché of European journalism, only slightly less ugly than the idea that Europe—the United States of Europe, ideally—ought to emulate the United States in...
Say what you will, there is no dame like an Italian grande dame. Though based on my own experience, this claim is easily supported by any amount of independent observation as the number of subjects to whom it applies, given that the history of the aristocracy in this country resembles schematic representations of nuclear fission...
Now that I think of it, I realize it was my own poor mother who told me that there is much too much food in these letters. Listen my only begotten, she complained by telephone from New York, what with all your extravagant food descriptions, delightful food tropes, and revealing food analogies, you probably don’t...
I am writing this from a cottage near Santa Maria di Leuca, on the southernmost tip of Italy in the Adriatic. As the luggage, including my maps and guidebooks, only arrived yesterday, I cannot really be expected to say anything worth believing about the land or the people. As for the curious inner workings of...
A few years ago, before my son was born, I spent a weekend in the Hamptons at the country house of a moderately hip American investment banker. There were about 20 of us to dinner that evening, with all the usual cosmopolitan strains amply represented. Boring and predictable as the whole business was, by about...
Reading over my last letter from Venice, I spot the word “improbable,” which has somehow slipped in through the barbed wire fence of watchful Russianness I have been building in order to keep all manner of tripe out of these monthly communications. I am sorry, and promise that nothing of the kind will ever happen...
The more a man of the world looks at the world, the more he is persuaded that not only are its political and social truths rarely what they seem, they are often the diametrical opposite of what they seem. So, in one memorable episode, did many an Englishman, a copy of the Times in one...
The other day I remembered how the Lebanese, by far the most quaintly European of all the social sets in London, used to play an after-dinner parlor game in which the guests won points by boasting of their innocence. For example, if a guest said, “I’ve never been on a private plane,” or “I’ve never...
It has been only a few weeks since I used my tears to moisten the mixed-fruit schiacciata cake of Florentine captivity, but from the chaise lounge on my terrace it seems that this was in another life. Here, at last, I know I am where I belong, a spark of cosmic indolence fortuitously restored to...
I already sounded the alarm in last month’s letter. This really is an impossible city to get out of And so, having bid my farewells, I’m still here, despite the fact that the rent has been paid in advance on a perfectly adequate little aerie over the Grand Canal in Venice. The place even has...
This is probably my last letter from Florence, and I must say that it is with somewhat mixed feelings that I turn my back on the treasury of the Renaissance. Oh, sure, I tried to like living here. I tried it the way the French writer Andre Gide tried to like living in Stalin’s Moscow,...
I am actually writing this from a lonely place called Marsiliana, in the Maremma region of Tuscany, where my Florentine hosts have a hunting lodge. It is less than half an hour by car from the Argentario coastline, my inspiration for last summer’s seaside letters, and I remember driving past its desolate form whenever a...
“The only reward to be expected from the cultivation of literature is contempt if one fails and hatred if one succeeds.” —Voltaire When Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities came out in England more than a decade ago, I reviewed it in the Times with that special elation obscure Soviet...
In Something of Myself, his 1935 autobiography, Kipling remembers that when he was a young man, working for the English newspaper in the Punjab, “I no more dreamed of dressing myself than I did of shutting an inner door or—I was going to say turning a key in a lock. But we had no locks.”...
The domiciliary organ of the host to which I have now attached myself is the cavernous Renaissance of every spiritual parasite’s dreams, most of it still inhabited, in that Cherry Orchard kind of way which keeps grand English country houses tottering but not always falling to the National Trust, by the descendants of the Florentine...
The sun is no longer the hot buttered pancake worshipped by the ancient Slavs: It has been reformed into an altogether more Christian, Lenten, and distant figure. The sea is still beautiful, though it too no longer moves with the same pagan frankness, its orgiastic, by turns manic and depressive, barometrically motivated summer feasts and...
“What is there to say about someone who did nothing all his life but sit on his bottom and write reviews?” Thus the subject of this biography, who saw himself as a modern Sainte-Beuve, once excoriated Sainte-Beuve in a private letter. To his biographer, Cyril Connolly’s lament is so self-revealing, so emblematic of the life...