Dante’s Beach, Ravenna
It was midnight, more or less, and my middle daughter, Magdalena, 18, said with all the untroubled bravado of youth: ‘Let’s go and find il rospo!’
She was at the wheel of the Land Rover Defender and we were involved in a nocturnal driving lesson. Rospo is Italian for toad. And if you say ‘Dio Rospo’ (‘Toad God’), that’s blasphemy, so as a good Catholic she doesn’t, whereas, as a bad one, I do because it is funny, as God would surely agree.
We drove on slowly, passing half a dozen or so parked cars with solitary men inside them
‘Il rospo’ is our family nickname for the fat man with the eyes of a dead person who emerges after dark in the village thanks to the theft of part of our beautiful beach by highly trained nudists. Nudism, whatever holier-than-thou nudists claim, involves creatures like il rospo and one of their favourite extra-curricular activities, as I’ve said before, is dogging.
