Dante’s Beach, Ravenna

I was in the Land Rover Defender with Rita, my youngest daughter (16), parked up near Dante’s tomb in the old city as we drank coffee from paper cups before she began her day at art school. On a wall in front of us that had possibly been there since the Romans, and definitely since the Renaissance, was scrawled in black spray paint: ‘ Palestina libera dal fiume al mare !’ – Free Palestine from the river to the sea!

I asked Rita what mark she’d got in her English literature oral test on Romeo and Juliet . I’d helped her prepare. I’d even found the correct Italian word for ‘apothecary’, as in ‘O true apothecary, Thy drugs are quick’. Every online source I had consulted had said, absurdly, that the correct word is ‘ farmacista ’. ‘O true chemist.’

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