An enduring love affair with Italian food

I talk about Spain a lot. I love its diversity. Each time I visit I learn more about its glorious and sometimes inglorious history, but my time there is always cut short just as I’m getting to grips with it.

There is another country that vies for my attention just as much and that is wondrously delectable Italy. It’s impossible not to be in love with it. We have been there many times, from small hilltop villages in Umbria where it was so quiet the only thing that moved at night was the odd stray cat. It suited us perfectly when the girls were young, when all we did was watch them in the pool, cook and drink wine.

Later, visits to Garda and Como cemented our love of the country. We always drove, and after the inevitable hairy start there was the predictable hire car row as we made our way from the airport to the motorway. The mood would lift as we edged closer to our destination and speculated on dinner. On arrival, once fed, we were content in an instant. It was all spritzes and smiles after that.

Last year we were invited to a 50th birthday celebration at La Posta Vecchia, a magical hotel about an hour, and four pay grades, up the coast from Rome. Formerly John Paul Getty’s home, on the ruins of a Roman villa abutting the Mediterranean, it was impossible not to sense the history of the place and feel insignificant in the world.

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Romans still come to the area to escape the heat of the city, swim and eat in the numerous perfect beach restaurants that dot the lengthy coastline. We would swim, then eat hot crisp calamari and bowls of pasta washed down with cool, crisp jugs of wine. Generations of Laziale would sit around us chattering. The nonas would wipe ice cream from children’s faces as they gently scolded them before covering them with sunscreen and kisses. Did they know they were the luckiest people on earth, I would wonder? And for one weekend, we were too.

Recipe: Conchiglioni primavera with goat’s cheese