SOME years ago, on a visit to Florence, my husband and I took friends to one of our favourite bars. It was a bohemian place, the walls hung with terrible art dating back to its heyday in the 1920s, that day’s newspapers hanging from hooks, and a louche clientele, lounging away the afternoon and evening sipping beer and spirits in fedoras and flashy earrings.

Our friends took to it immediately, and we settled down, soaking up the atmosphere of this most picturesque, appealing city. Gradually, more and more people streamed past our table, heading for the restaurant at the back. Soon that room was packed, and speeches began, so loud we couldn’t hear ourselves. As they unfurled their flags, the truth dawned. We had stumbled into a rally for the Northern League, that hard-right party whose dearest wish is to rid Italy of immigrants, and part company with the poor and trouble-making south. The bar we’d thought of as relaxed and liberal was quite the reverse. Needless to say, we’ve never been back.

It was a reminder that there are two faces to Florence, as there are two sides to every place you visit as a passer-through. Not speaking the language obviously makes a difference to your understanding of where you are, but in the case of Italy, the gulf between reality and dreams is deep no matter how fluent your grasp of the lingo.

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That uncomfortably close encounter with the less attractive side of Italy was in my mind the other week, as we booked another trip to Tuscany. Our short break was planned for the week after Britain’s departure from Europe, when we would for the first time in our lives be visitors to a continent to which we were once umbilically attached.

Like so many whose plans revolved around the cut-off point of March 29, we were caught out. Nostalgia will have to wait. Yet, while we will undoubtedly spend much of our holiday bemoaning the state of UK politics, any Italian could tell us that things are scarcely much better there either. In some ways they might be considerably worse.

It’s a little shaming to realise how much I romanticise Italy and its culture, when I don’t extend the same goodwill to my home turf. From the first time I visited, the land of Dante and Raphael has represented everything civilised and appealing: art and books, beautiful cities, villages and countryside, delicious food and wine. First stop on our itinerary this week is an exhibition at the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence. Needless to say, to maintain their position in the middle ages as the main rival to the Medicis, the Strozzi family were no more angelic than the Sopranos. In fact, the palace is so sturdily built it could probably withstand nuclear attack. Only those with a lot to lose, and enemies who knew they did not wholly deserve it, needed a fortress on this scale.

That violent and acquisitive era has been replaced in modern times by a far more insidious menace, one that has crawled as far north as Venice, and even leapt the sea to Scotland. In a lowly trattoria one January night, we got talking with the waiter, who was from Calabria. Conversation was friendly until my husband mentioned that he hoped soon to meet Roberto Saviano, the journalist whose exposé of the Calabrian mafia, in his book Gomorrah, obliged him to go into hiding for the rest of his life. At the mention of his name, the waiter picked up his corkscrew and disappeared. We paid the bill in silence. Small-talk between strangers in this country is just that. It does not begin to scratch the surface, and there are certain subjects to be avoided until you know who you’re speaking to.

Books such as Tobias Jones’s The Dark Side of Italy paint a sobering picture of a nation riven by factions and oppressed by thugs. The sketchiest knowledge about war-time politics explains why its allegiances are so fractured, even now. So, while tourists wander around enjoying the attractions, or the cloudless turquoise sky, the country is, in some areas at least, run on bribery, corruption and fear. We just choose not to notice.

The meteoric rise of the Five Star Party in the last few years is but one symptom of a country near breaking point, over unemployment, immigration, the refugee crisis, and pay. Now under a populist coalition government, where the Five Star Movement and the League slug it out, things are in as perpetual a state of flux and agitation as they always were. Meanwhile, Italy floats on a sea of paperwork, tied in a bow with red tape. It takes years for decisions to be taken, even if they are urgent.

Perhaps it’s wiser – indeed safer – for visitors not to look too closely. If our own domestic affairs don’t bear scrutiny, why should we stand in judgement? This is not to say that we should ordinarily turn a blind eye. But surely the very definition of holiday is wearing rose-tinted sunglasses until you step off the plane back home?