On a conducted tour of Italy undertaken on the cheap in the summer of 2004, my family and I travelled by coach. We generally stayed in little hotels tucked into city outskirts, where people and places could not be bothered to put on a show for tourists. Our ten-day tour took us to Rome, the Vatican City, Pisa, Milan, Verona, Venice, Florence, Assisi, Pompeii, Sorrento, Naples, and Capri. We did see a bit of Italy. The patrician north swept by on the whiff of an arrogance manufactured in some perfumery of the Roman Empire. But in Florence and Rome, we also saw men and women who seemed to have stepped right out of the canvases of the Masters. Is that Caravaggio's Narcissus, reduced now to producing sketches for tourists? How obscene it is for a foreigner to come to Italy and be consumed by his own beauty! Look, Italians are so beautiful that the Renaissance came here for a visit and stayed on as art forever. Foolish tourists, be gone.

By the time we were in the south, we met people. In Sorrento, for the princely sum of 9.80 euros spent in a provision shop, I got to chat with the matriarch. She spoke in Italian and I replied in English, with a few translations helpfully thrown in by people in the queue. It hardly moved because the matriarch was chatting with me, but nobody minded. The encounter ended with the lady getting her two daughters in the shop to stop work, change into the best clothes they had at hand, and pose with my family and me. She did not want copies of the photographs: They would not have Singapore in them. She wanted her daughters to look beautiful in our photographs: They are Italians. The queue lengthened in patience. On the way out, my teenage son got a hug and football stickers as presents.