Signs of life in the holiday rental across the street from our bedroom window. The first of the year. The street is so narrow we could almost touch fingertips but I’ve never set foot there, such is the topography of this city of blind alleys and gated courtyards. And the holidaymakers, because they’re absorbed in the adventure of playing house in a foreign place or more likely because they’re just not as nosey as I am, haven’t noticed me. I can tell you what they had for breakfast: decaffeinated coffee, vacuum-packed croissants and tasteless strawberries (too early in the season). I can tell you what time they got up (7.30) and that the tea towel they can’t find has fluttered from the windowsill to the street four floors below. In seven years I don’t believe I’ve ever seen any of these holidaymakers out and about in the street. Or is it that I don’t recognize them, that they look so different when they’re not wearing a bathrobe and scratching themselves where the sun don’t shine?

I notice more and more stories in the Italian press about parish priests being penalised for intruding rudely on their parishioners’ Sunday morning lie-in by ringing their church bells. I know this kind of campaigning goes on in Britain, where the church now has about the same status as tree-hugging, a country where you can’t go into any store, not even a book shop, without being forced to listen to piped music, but a call to worship is regarded as ‘noise nuisance’. But in Italy! We live by the bells here. They wakes us, they signal it’s time to contemplate lunch, and the six o’clock angelus marks the end of my working day.

Well one priest in the Veneto has dug his heels in. As he points out, the church was there long before the complainers. If you don’t like church bells, move to Saudi. I think I might send the Dom a little something towards his fine.