I am under the shade of a chestnut tree, accompanied by the song of the cicada. The intense July heat of Bologna is invitation for their annual party-piece – a melody so loud that the brain has no choice but to silence it by way of habituation.

The bus was moving east on the Strada Maggiore and away from the centre – so I took it, in pursuit of a neighbourhood crawling with Italians.

Summer tourism is a low-fares locust invasion, grinding menus to expensive gruel and traffic to a halt.

A place with history and no continuity is a palliative tundra, interpreted on panels in three languages.

Speaking of which, my Italian is the derivative kind – constructed principally through circumstantial evidence. I draw on French and Spanish as they are familiar to me; I draw on the opera arias I love for pronunciation; lastly, I am a verbal magpie, borrowing the phrase someone else has just used, repurposing it for my own pleasure.

The result, when ordering, is that I receive the coffee and glass of water preferred by the man in front of me, alongside the croissant to which the woman two customers ahead is partial.

The misalignment reminds me of an emblematic sketch from The Two Ronnies (a BBC staple of my childhood, before that institution became consumed by the propagation of borrowed morality). The scenario is Mastermind, and little Ronnie’s specialised subject is answering the question previous to the question asked. The result is so full of wit and truth that I rewatch it frequently, despite the barbs coming from a time long past.

***

Arrival into Bologna came upon me like a Tennyson poem.

I had forgotten how flat the great northern plain of Italy is, once the Alps have completed their pleasing tectonic collision. From my great height, the land seemed like a siren, pleading to be anointed. Meandering rivers sparkled in the morning sun, pleased to bring the soil relief.

‘On either side the river lie

Long fields of barley and of rye

That clothe the wold and meet the sky…’

Bologna’s airport is freshly constructed and easy to use, with the exception of the soap dispensers and hand dryers, of course. We live not yet in an age when such things are mastered, but strive to lessen their imperfections.

Around the arrival carousel, customs officers closely observed the rotating luggage. Something in their tone suggested mission.

This transported me to a singular experience of Italian law enforcement when 27 years old, in which I was inadvertently collared for a crime I did not commit.

As the thought crossed my mind, the word ‘benvenuti’ appeared on every wall.

***

It occurred at Milan airport, on my arrival from a boozy few days in Cannes – where the world’s Duty Free industry gathers, and pretends to be glamorous, not gluttonous.

My flight spewed out its checked luggage, from which I grabbed my own.

In seconds, I had two Alsatian dogs lunging at me, growling, held back by customs agents on some sort of reconnaissance brief.

I was detained on the pretext that I was carrying drugs; which I was not.

Some hours later, at 11pm, I stood in an office full of files illuminated with fluorescent lighting, faced by four officers sitting behind desks. Each had a pen and paper. I had stopped playing at Italian and insisted on English, which one now restfully spoke.

I disrobed item by item of clothing from my body at their direction. The garments’ weave and seams were examined, two officers at a time.

I too had witnessed the dogs, so knew they were not setting me up, but also knew that I had never taken drugs in my life.

‘I don’t even smoke’, I protested, my chosen air of bemusement extinguished by the next blunt question.

The interrogation lasted an hour, during which I came to understand that innocence is not the same as being problem-free.

Once in a while, circumstances contrive to point in one’s direction. And youth, if so disposed, can enjoy the attention just a tad too much.

Many Americans were introduced to the Italian justice system in a similarly Knoxian way: a young woman acting out in the wake of the vicious murder of Meredith Kercher in Perugia, is understood as a vixen, slyly covering for the felling of her friend.

***

My mini-detention of 1993 has never dimmed my appreciation of Italy and Italians.

In the end, the officials abandoned their mission, visibly frustrated. They could find no evidence, despite being fully assured of my guilt.

In the years since, my strongest theory is that things kicked off in Cannes. I had been out in the bars the previous night during a time when indoor smoking was de rigueur. Perhaps my jacket picked up the remnants of another’s encounter with white powder.

This casual act intersected with professional canines, which ultimately were neither fully wrong nor fully right.

***

The Italians are a bureaucratic people. There is method in the exceptional beauty of the civilisation they have created. Every detail is signed and countersigned.

I feel grateful that those customs men, watching me wilt at midnight, had little interest in my fate. They cared only for the evidence, which at length was not forthcoming. One by one, they quit the room, the last muttering that I was now free to go.

Like the cicada, my destiny would be to return, again and again, to this most glorious country. And although nobody much cares, I sing to it in grateful song, with words cobbled together so few can understand.