If I hadn't been the youngest person on that flight to Venice, I'm sure I would never have been stopped at customs. I wouldn't have been so flustered then when I finally left the airport and would undoubtedly have thought more carefully about where the bus I got on was going to. And, therefore, I would probably have ended up somewhere slightly more sensible than Govia (which is, to quote the guidebook, a small town of some historical interest, nestled at the foot of the Dolomites, rouah1y in-between Padova and Verona). However things don't always work out the way you'd plan them.

As we traipsed off the plane and into the airport I was right behind this business man. He wasn't just a normal business man either. He was a kind of VIP executive with designer dark glasses, a camel hair coat and a mobile phone. He was the kind of man who, I imagined, had a driver waiting to pick him up outside (a driver who sat silent, but seeping subdued surliness, behind a leather steering wheel, and wished he were wearing a suit that made him look more as if he might have a brother who was in the Mafia).

As we waited to go through customs, the business man kept on checking the time on his watch and that the knot of his tie covered the top button of his shirt, his thin lips rehearsing the curses that would spill sourly from his jet-lagged lips if that driver were not there waiting for him.

Personally, I thought the man looked a bit shifty, fidgeting about and gripping the handle of his briefcase as if it were welded to his palm. But at customs they just waved him on to the immigration desk, where the passport man saluted him and let him straight through.

I guess I was kind of unfortunate to be next in line behind someone who was dressed so smartly. I mean, compared to him I must have looked a right state, what with having got ready in such a rush and everything that morning. But, to be honest, even if I had been wearing socks, I reckon they still would have stopped me, because, like I say, I was the youngest person on the flight. Ironically, the two soldiers who leapt out in front of me (as I attempted to follow that business man through the nothing to declare channel) were probably about the same age as me. Though they did actu~ly seem much older with their khaki uniforms, shaved heads and prodding machine guns!

The man who was in charge of the customs didn't share either the soldiers' youth or their officious enthusiasm. He looked tired, as if he had been doing the job for some years (without having discovered that many diamonds hidden in hollow bibles), and was surprisingly casually dressed.

He wore dark coloured jeans and a brightly striped short-sleeve shirt (which looked as if it had been selected by his wife from his wardrobe rather than issued by any regulation outfitters). He also had a huge bush of a moustache and a mouthful of chewing gum.

After the soldiers had stopped me, the man started to ask me loads of questions. He spoke really fast and, of course, I didn't have a bloody clue what he was going on about. I just stood there shaking my head and mumbling, 'I'm English. I don't understand,' in a feeble kind of way.

"Passiporta!" he said.

"What?" I said.

"Passiporta!" he repeated, chewing his gum a bit more quickly.

"Oh right, yea, passport," I said. But, of course, what with those army blokes waving their guns in my face and everything, I couldn't remember where the hell I'd put the bloody thing. I searched through all my pockets and then I remembered it was in my bag.

As I put the bag down on the counter and started to undo it, one of the soldiers pushed me aside and muttered something to this bloody great dog he had with him. It was a German Shepherd I think, although I wouldn't swear to it (I was too busy shitting myself to consider its pedigree).

The dog clambered up onto the counter and stood there with a paw on each side of my bag and had a good old nose around. You could tell he was really well trained. He was the kind of dog you could imagine bounding through a wood, jaws clamped round a huge branch, wagging ~s tail, eager to please. Mind you, you got the feeling he could turn nasty If th~ mo~d took him. He had that glint in his eye as if, given half a chance, he mIght np your arm off and playfully run around with that instead.

Luckily, as the dog was having a good old sniff of my bag, I managed to find my passport. I handed it over to the gum chewer, the cover all slippery

with sweat from my fingers. Well, as soon as he saw that daft photo of me taken in the booth at Woolworth's when I was about twelve, he called this other man over.

The man was wearing white gloves and a really smart blue uniform.

Dead elegant it was with scarlet stripes down the sleeves and gold tassels on each shoulder. He was all stiff and polished like an army captain or something, although he was probably just a normal policeman. He flipped through the pages of my passport and stroked the edge of that stupid photograph with a crisp cotton finger (as if tickling a new-born kitten) and stared at me, long and hard (but with total indifference, as if he were peering through me at some very boring notice attached to the wall behind my head).

He pushed out his bottom lip and muttered something. The gum chewer (who was beginning to look worryingly serious) asked him a question. But captain elegant was unwilling or unable to answer. He just shrugged his shoulders in a dismissive way and wandered haughtily off again (as if he were some day soon destined to take up a position of authority in the papal palace guard and, in the meantime, had no desire to dirty his freshly-laundered gloves on the passport photographs of inunigrant reprobates).

The gum chewer stared at me for a moment, his jaw slowly grinding like a dairy cow chewing the cud as he carefully stroked his moustache, then he shoved his hand into my rucksack and started to pull all my stuff out.

That was quite embarrassing actually, because having been in such a rush that morning I'd just chucked my pants and socks and razors and what have you into the rucksack at random and they were all crumpled and jumbled together. Put it this way - if there were a bomb in there, it looked as if it had already exploded!

By this time I was literally quaking in my Reeboks, certain that at any moment the gum chewer, with a dismissive click of his fingers, would signal to those two soldiers to take me away. I pictured them gleefully dragging me off to some room somewhere; a bare cold room with a chair and a spot light and no windows, or a white room smelling of rubber and antiseptic where a huge ugly nurse, wearing a little white cap and a cruel sneer, would be peeling on a pair of surgical gloves.

As I stood there desperately trying to look innocent, the gum chewer went through absolutely everything in my bag. He unrolled my socks and opened my camera and even took the top off my toothpaste and gave it a squeeze. God knows what he expected to find in there - drugs or diamonds or something. Anyway, when he'd pulled about half the stuff from my bag I could tell his fingers must have touched my metal paint tin, because his eyes lit up like a kid who has just won the star prize in the lucky dip.

My paint tin was given to me by my grandad who was a Desert Rat in the Second World War and it still rattled with Mrican sands. The gum chewer loved that. He gave the tin a good old shake and then opened it up.

He tipped out my little Windsor and Newton water-colour blocks and offered them to the dog like they were a handful of biscuits. The dog stuck his nose in them and wagged his tail and then sat down. The gum chewer scattered the paints over the counter like polka dice. He waved the emptied tin at me and asked me something else in Italian. I mimed painting a picture.

"Artista?" he asked.

I nodded and got out my sketch book and showed him some of the paintings I'd done of lizard head spires piercing skies of cobalt and turpentine. Suddenly, his frown melted into a smile. And as he turned the pages, he began to murmur, bene, bene, grinning like I was his favourite nephew or something.

He stepped back from the counter and gestured at me to put my stuff back in my bag. One of the soldiers said something, but the gum chewer just waved him away. As I gathered up my socks and pencils and stuff, he smiled and coyly twisted the end of his moustache, then pointed at me and called over to captain elegant: Artista!

The captain sniffed, raised one eyebrow and picked an imaginary speck of fluff from his left lapel as I hurried on to the passport control desk. The man behind the desk was reading a newspaper with a huge photo of Rud Gullitt on the front cover beneath some headline about Sampdoria. He took my passport, and without lifting his head, lazily shifted his eyes from his paper to my photo to my face and then back to his paper again. He handed me my passport and I was out of there quicker than a whippet on whizz.

Honestly, I couldn't have been keener to get clear of that airport if I'd had half a kilo of charlie up my jumper, I can tell you. I went straight through the arrivals lounge, past a little booth selling papers and cigarettes, and out onto the first bus I saw.

Mter a bit, the bus driver came up and started gabbling on at me. Oh shit, I thought, here we go again. I got out a handful of lire (part of a large wad of notes I'd exchanged at Heathrow) and kind of offered them to him.

One ticket, uno billietti I said. But he kept blathering on about something or other and pushing the money away and saying No! No! and throwing his hands in the air and pointing back at the airport.

Luckily there was a woman on the bus who spoke English otherwise we could have been there all day. The woman explained that I had to buy a little ticket from the booth back in the arrivals lounge. As we got off the bus, the driver muttered something and the woman laughed.

"Andiamo," she said.

I smiled dumbly and warily followed her to the ticket office, where she took ten thousand lire from me and brought me my billietti. As we walked back to the bus she asked, "So, you are on holiday?"

"No, well, yea, sort of - I'm going to paint."

"Artista?" she said.

"Yes" I said "artista "

"You go to Venice?" she said. I wasn't sure if she was asking whether I was going there or telling me to go there. So I just nodded and said,

"Yea, Venice."

"You go to Verona?" she asked.

"Probably," I said.

"Oh you must," she said. "It is very beautiful to paint I think."

"I'll definitely go there then," I said.

"I think is good idea," she said, nodding.

I thanked her for helping me.

"Niente," she said and smiled as we both got back on the bus.

The lady's kindness had helped to calm me down a bit. But, I don't mind telling you, as I sat there on the bus, clutching my ticket with my ruck sack on my knees, I was still trembling and sweating like a retired racehorse en route to a glue factory. I guess I just wasn't used to having a couple of machine guns shoved in my back.

Believe it or not, I am actually quite a law abiding person. But whenever I see someone in a uniform I can't help feeling a bit guilty. You sometimes read stories about these people who lock themselves away in their bedrooms because they're convinced that the whole world is conspiring against them. They won't even answer the door to the postman because they think he's some kind of alien or something, just itching to pull a laser gun from his post sack and blast them into the next millennium.

Now, I'm not quite as paranoid as all that, but I have to admit, as I sat on that bus with all these little old Italian ladies staring at me and chattering away (in what might as well have been Martian for all I understood of it) I did feel a bit as if I were from another planet.

For a moment, I regretted ever having decided to go to Italy. For a moment, it seemed like a pretty bloody silly idea. But when the bus driver eventually stopped reading his paper outside and finally started the engine, I cheered up a bit. And as we got farther away from the airport I began to feel more relaxed and actually quite excited, travelling through that strange and dus lands , . .

II

As we passed through all these little towns in the sunshine, being overtaken by suicidal Fiats and arrogant Alfa Romeos, it seemed strange to think that a couple of days earlier I'd been on the building site back home, shivering in the rain.

On three sides the sky was filled with mountains, their white peaks jutting above a purple-green sea of forest like giant sugar frosted shark fins (which is not something I normally see driving up and down the M4 corridor in my van). To the south stretched fields of maize, peach and kiwi orchards, and, further on, cropless squares of camel brown soil punctuated by rows of slender, ornately pruned trees and some promising looking church towers.

It reminded me a bit of the landscapes that my grandad had painted of Italy when he was in the army. He was posted there for a while towards the end of the war after the allies had done the business in Africa. Mussolini had long since been strung up by then, so he didn't have to shoot anyone or anything like that. Mainly he just sat around smoking and chatting about football with the Italian POW's, (and wondering when he was going to be sent back home again, I guess).

His water-colours, which mainly seem to be painted on the back of confidential military communiqués, he kept in a scrap book, along with a variety of Italian ephemera and photographs of soldiers in baggy shirts sat on jeeps in the desert, smoking and smiling.

Grandad's pictures always seemed to have a washed out dryness about them, which I'd always assumed was due to the paucity of the paper they'd been painted on and the length of time they'd been left up in the attic of my grandparent's bungalow. But as I travelled through that countryside, that first day, I realised that the paleness of colour, the dustiness of the roads and houses, had actually been pretty accurately captured by grandad those forty years or so earlier.

And as we drove along it felt at times as if I'd stepped into one of grandad's paintings, like in the film Mary Poppins when she and those two kids step into the pictures that Bert has chalked on the pavement. The foreigness just seemed so familiar. And I don't know why, but for a moment, then, I shut my eyes and imagined I was one of those soldiers sitting crushed together in the back of a truck travelling across the North African desert with my kit bag on my knee. I couldn't imagine it properly though. All I could think of was those sheep you see going past in trucks sometimes, with bits of wool sticking out.

Eventually we came to the outskirts of this town, where the traffic grew heavier and slower and the sloped roofs of factories blocked out the mountains. As we got deeper into the suburbs and those chattering ladies started getting off at bus stops and greeting friends, I sensed and somehow shared in their happiness at arriving safely home and began to feel that taking that trip had been the right thing to do.

After all, I'd only been in Italy ten minutes and already the customs man and a stranger on a bus had shown more enthusiasm in my paintings than any one else ever had since Miss Thomas at school. Normally you show someone your pictures and they say 'that's nice dear' or something similar in a dreary kind of way. It's amazing how good a little bit of real enthusiasm can make you feel.

Anyway, the first big town we came too, just happened to be Govia. It seemed an OK kind of place, so I thought I might as well get off there. Luckily there was a tourist information office at the bus station where they were really friendly and booked me into this hotel called the Albergo Ferrino (the cheapest one that had any rooms free).

As it turned out, I was actually quite pleased I'd ended up in Govia, rather than Venice. It's not a particularly well known town. I mean, it hasn't got a famous football team like Juventus or anything, but it was definitely the kind of place I would tell people to be sure to visit if ever they were in the area.

III

That first morning in the Albergo Ferrino I was finally forced from my bed by sunshine which sliced through a gap between the window shutters and fell onto my face. It was the third time my sleep had been disturbed. Much earlier, whilst it was still dark outside, I'd been woken by the sound of men beneath the window emptying rubbish into a lorry very loudly, then calling out and laughing as they banged their way down the street. I'd only just gone back to sleep when I was disturbed for a second time by church bells, hundreds of them - some near, some far, some higher, some lower - all ringing together.

After the bells had eventually stopped, I managed to grab a few minutes of sleep, before being woken that third and final time by the nagging warmth of the sun. Although I sensed it was quite late, I dozed for a while, waiting for the sun to rise properly above the rooftops before I got up.

Lying half-awake on a hard (yet strangely comfortable) pillow, I watched dust swirl in a broad shaft of light that slowly climbed the wall until it reached a strategically placed plastic Christ on a balsa wood cross a few inches above my head. Then, I sat up, reached forward to open the shutters wider, and peered lazily out across the road.

Beyond the roof of the pizzeria opposite the albergo, I could make out the edge of the main tower of the Basilica di Santa Violiene, its redbrick facade laced with white stone like piped icing on a cake. Behind the tower was a huge, pale, smog-grey dome, and in front of it I could just see the tops of cypress trees where small brown birds fluttered, their distant twittering drowned out by the rumble of traffic and the bustle and chatter of chamber maids in the corridor outside my room.

My room, like rest of the albergo was sparsely furnished with bare stone walls and a crack-rivered floor made of pebbles embedded in a kind of mortar. There was no shower in the room, just a single bed, a small wardrobe and a sink with a mirror. Beside the sink was a towel rail on which hung two crisp white towels, starched to a knife edge. Aside from the towels and the bedclothes, there was nothing in the room to absorb noise - no carpets, no curtains, no cushions - and every footstep, every shut cupboard door, every agitated bed spring, made an echo. I mean, if you so much as farted you imagined it would rattle the shutters ten rooms away.

In my usual lazy fashion, the previous evening I'd worn my boxer shorts and T-shirt to bed, and was feeling pretty grimy from all that travelling the day before. So, before I got dressed or anything, I decided I'd better have a shower. I reluctantly prised myself out of bed, my feet flinching as they touched the cold floor, and grabbed one of the starched towels from the sink. Then I slipped into my trainers and headed for the shower room, which I'd passed the previous evening at the end of the corridor.

The corridor was very long and very high and had just been polished with something very slippery that smelled like a cross between incense and Dettol. The floor of the corridor was as hard and bare as that in my room, and as I made my way carefully down it my footsteps echoed as if the soles of my Reeboks were made of stone.

The shower room was unexpectedly large and reminded me a bit of the sports changing rooms at school. In addition to a single solitary shower, the room included three toilet cubicles and about ten sinks, each with it's own cracked mirror. The cubicles were all empty but someone was in the shower listening to the radio - a mixture of Italian pop songs and old rock 'n'roll hits.

I waited through To Know Him is to Love Him by the Ronettes, Be Bop a Lula by Gene Vincent and Mean Woman Blues by Elvis. I know all those songs because my dad listens to them all the time, especially on Sunday mornings. He sits there reading the Sunday Express and whistling along to his Golden Years of Rock n' Roll LP. When the record's finished he wanders into the kitchen and has a kind of ritual Sunday morning argument with my mum as she peels vegetables for the Sunday roast, then pisses off to his greenhouse to grumble at his cucumbers. It's no wonder I left home when I did.

Anyway, in the end I got fed up waiting for the mystery singer to finish his shower. I could hear the maids knocking on doors and rattling keys in locks down the corridor, so I decided to go back to my room and wash there. The hotel towels were like sandpaper so, after I'd splashed a bit of cold water on my face, I rubbed myself down with a spare T-shirt and hung it over the window sill to dry.

For breakfast I had an orange and the remains of a bread roll I'd brought from this little supermarket the previous evening, washed down with a little mineral water which fizzed on my tongue like sherbet. Then, I packed some cheesy puffs and a small bag of cashew nuts (which I'd bought at the same time as the oranges and stuff) in my rucksack, and headed downstairs. When I got to the hotel lobby it was deserted so I just left my room key behind the reception desk and headed out into the street.

Beyond the entrance to the hotel was an arcade that ran the length of the street, canopied by the overhanging facades of a row of ancient buildings. The upper floors of the buildings were held up by crumbling columns and archways, which were strengthened at intervals by iron bars. The bars were very low and wide - just the right height to deliver a deadly blow to the skull of some tall stranger walking brisk and unsuspecting through the dark. I mean, even I had to duck beneath a couple of them and I'm no basketball player.

Although it was quite chilly beneath the shaded archways, I didn't mind. It just made the occasional alcoves of sunlight seem that much warmer. And as I strolled along, I suddenly felt happier than I had done for a long time.

At the end of the street I reached a wider, cobbled road, the Via Dante, where cars sped along with rattling bumpers and shuddering suspensions. As I headed left towards the town centre, a group of scooters and mopeds bounced past followed by an old lady on an even older bicycle. The lady wore a thick, crimson shawl and had three doggy passengers - a smooth haired, grey nosed dog lying in a black saddle bag up front and two smaller shaggy dogs standing in a wicker basket at the back. The two smaller dogs were bumping about so much they could barely stay on their feet (or, should I say, their paws). But they seemed happy enough, wagging their tails and barking briefly at every person they passed.

The buildings in the Via Dante, like most of those in Govia, were painted in ice cream colours, the colours of the fruit-flavoured concoctions that filled the deep plastic tubs in the town's numerous gelaterias; strawberry walls with mint shutters, banana with chocolate shutters, tangerine with coffee balconies, melon, vanilla, you name it. I guess that makes it sound as if the place were all very colourful. But, to be honest, if I'd wanted to paint a true picture of the street, I would have had to scoop a handful of dust from the gutter and sprinkle it into my little metal tin of paints. For the walls of the shops and houses were all faded and flaked. All the paint was peeling, the iron verandas were rusted and most of the shutters were broken and infested. Cracks ran down walls and in places whole chunks of plaster had fallen away leaving bare brick showing beneath, so that the buildings resembled old wedding cakes from which bits of icing had been greedily taken.

Despite its dereliction, the town had retained a certain beauty. Although the buildings were individual in colour and style, each complemented its neighbours with delicate decoration, repeated rows of shuttered windows, ornate doors and ledges, and even occasional statues which gazed down at the street through melted, smog-blackened eyes.

In short, Govia was like a fairy tale world lost inside the tube of an enormous industrial vacuum cleaner, like a once beautiful woman who has entered the latter years of middle age. You can still tell how good she must have looked in her youth. But without makeup, the wrinkles around the eyes seem so deep. The sag of skin over cheek bone is all too evident. The pale skin illuminated in bright sunlight seems so sallow as if that fragile beauty might soon slump into an indisputable ugliness, all traces of former elegance having finally vanished. I guess the town threatened to go the way of that kind of woman. But, for the time being, its foreigness and air of living history still lent it a kind of intriguing charm.

All along the street between the fronts of shops full of crucifixes and coke cans, colour computers and hand made shirts were huge doors. Some of the doors were open revealing rich secrets behind the crumbling facades - a smoke-windowed limousine parked on a stone drive way, a fountain veiled by willows, a yellow green garden full of statues, nymphs and Apollos, a fresco and a grave.

Toward the centre of town the roads opened out into wide piazzas bordered by cafes and pizzerias which filled the air with the smell of coffee, fresh bread, mixed herbs and fried mushrooms. Unable to resist those heavenly aromas, I stopped at a bread shop-cum-sandwich bar to queue for a huge slab of doughy pizza topped with mozzarella and slices of fantastic fungi, dark and shaggy as ink-caps.

I was served by a girl who joked with every customer as she gently slipped their pizzas into brown paper bags, and whose smile, when directed at me, made me fall instantly in love with her. As the girl turned to add my note to a shallow drawer beneath the till, she looked from the back uncannily like an old girlfriend of mine, Mandy Morton. When the girl turned back to face me, I noticed a slight bulge beneath her white apron. With fumbling fingers, I slowly took my change from her gentle flour-dusted palms and prayed that she was just a little podgy and not pregnant, catching her eye for another one of those smiles as I jangled out of the door.

I ate my pizza in front of a record shop, peering in through the window at a display of mainly British and American LPs, Springsteen rubbing shoulders with Whitney Houston, Pearl Jam and my favourites New Order (who can generally be relied upon for a displayable album sleeve). When I'd finished my pizza (which tasted almost as delicious as that girl in the bread shop looked), I brought some black, plastic Ray Bans style sunglasses off this African guy who was selling stuff on a rug outside the record shop. Then I set off to explore the town properly.

As I strolled along, I unfolded this map-cum-guide book I'd been given by the tourist people at the bus station, and had a quick look to see if there were any historic landmarks worth visiting. I decided that neither the Museum of Mountain Farming (from medieval times to the modern day) nor the Fiat Train of the Future Exhibition were really my thing. But towards the bottom of the map was what appeared to be a huge green hot cross bun, which seemed kind of intriguing, so I decided to check it out.

Not being very good with maps, I put it back in my pocket and resorted to my usual method of place-location (i.e., wandering in roughly the right direction until by chance I stumbled upon wherever it was I happened to be looking for). As I headed in the general direction of the big green bun, I passed more shops and offices: an estate agents with it's window covered in a mosaic of coloured cards; a dress makers with rolls of patterned cloths on shelves to the ceiling; a music store selling cut price compact discs and tickets for a David Bowie concert in Milan; and a Chinese restaurant, all dragons, stir fry and noodles.

Eventually I reached a bridge over a wide, murky canal which, according to the map, flowed all the way to Venice. In the canal a wooden pleasure boat was moored complete with a grinning Neptune figurehead.

As I paused to peer down at the boat, I saw two huge goldfish surface from the slow green water then dive creating ripples that lapped the banks where straggly willows stooped heavy with catkins. I waited for the fish to reappear, but they didn't. So I continued on my way (wondering if I'd just imagined them).

Just beyond the bridge was a bird shop with a garden full of tall palms, and peacocks and pheasants in big cages. In the shop window, in a much smaller cage, was a toucan. It was black with a white bib, a red tail and an orange and yellow beak. That beak was so long the toucan had to move from side to side on its narrow perch and pause to balance before swinging it round. The bird had a little trough of seed from which it kept on scooping up mechanical mouthfuls like an excavator scoops up earth. There were lots of other birds in the shop and I counted forty canaries in one cage.

I had a sudden urge to smash through that window, rip open all those bars and scream - 'fly away canaries, fly away toucan'. But I knew what the toucan would do. It would just sit there, ruffle its clipped wing feathers and continue its neurotic seed shovelling and beak swinging. So, I just walked away and tried to forget about it.

The big green hot cross bun on the map turned out to be a large circular park, which was surrounded by a moat where goldfish flitted and wishes could be made for the throw of a coin. The moat was crossed by four little bridges, leading to paths of grey chippings which cut the park into quarters.

Between the bridges were sat many people: elegant ladies chatting and smoking; old men reading papers; young couples sharing small tubs of ice cream and the occasional kiss; and beggar boys with rolled-up sleeves reaching down to retrieve pennies from the water.

Towering over the various people were several statues of famous men and women. I saw Caesar and Garibaldi, but Michelangelo was being cleaned and restored, hidden inside a little wooden shed, as were various other warriors, artists and philosophers, the folds of their cloaks and the blades of their swords having been sooted-over and eaten away by the corrosive fumes of the endless traffic that belched and roared its way around an anarchic, cobbled roundabout which surrounded the park.

Having lingered for a while on one of the bridges, I followed a path through the park, past clump of students who lounged on the grass with big thighs and expensive sunglasses, until I reached the centre, where I sat for a while on a bum-numbing stone bench and watched pigeons wash in a small fountain, dipping and shaking their feathers.

The fountain was surrounded by naked chestnuts hung with brown prickly husks. Among the trees were school kids in Technicolor coats, who stole each others bags and dangled them over the foaming water, before chasing through the sunbathers and purple cups of early crocuses, trampling daffodils, budding but yet to bloom.

As I sat there, wistfully watching the kids run round me, I scattered some cheesy puffs and cashew nuts for pigeons which descended cooing and flapping to peck among the grit. The pigeons were pretty manky. Most were missing a toe or two and some had no toes at all.

One pigeon hopped up on to the bench beside me and warily approached my outstretched hand, then finally summoned up courage to reach out and peck a cashew from my palm before hopping away with a flurry of flapping.

A puppy with huge paws scampered over and yapped at the pigeons, and they flocked into the air and flew off in a wide circle above the traffic. The puppy was very thick set and had the smoothest, shiniest coat of any dog I've ever seen. He looked as if he had been carved from a solid lump of some pinkish brown/grey rock and brought to life by a magic spell, rather like Pinocchio (except, of course, he was a boy made from wood rather than a dog made from stone).

The puppy snuffled up the remainder of the cheesy puffs that I'd scattered on the ground for the pigeons, then sat down in front of me, his pink hungry eyes gazing with longing at the half-empty packet in my lap. I reached out to pat his long grey nose and his thick wet tongue slobbered all over my cheese-flavoured fingers. Then a lady called out to the puppy and, after one last sniff of my hand, he turned and gambolled over to her.

The lady was not particularly young, but certainly worth a second look. She had bleached blonde hair tied tight back over her head and heavily made up eyes and lashes. And she wore a flimsy blue cardigan dress through which her breasts strained like a couple of boiled eggs in crocheted cosies (similar to the ones that my gran used to give us when we went to hers for tea after school, back when my mum was working).

I gave the lady my best smile, which she grudgingly acknowledged with a disappointingly dismissive nod. Then she pulled a long, red lead from a large, patterned bag which hung over her shoulder, fastened it to the puppy's chunky collar and they wandered off down the path to my right - the puppy scampering about and wagging his tail and hindquarters madly, whilst she teetered along on dark blue stilettos, the cheeks of her woolly blue arse tightly clenched as if any relaxation of buttock muscle might loosen her flesh and ripple her knicker line.

When the woman and the dog were gone, I tipped the remains of my cashew nuts onto the edge of the grass and watched ants struggle to pick their way through the salt and carry crumbs to the edge of the path and force them down holes in the dry earth to their nest below. I sat there for quite a while after that, with my new sunglasses perched just above my forehead, idly observing the antics of various passers-by, including a tramp who took his sandals and socks off and clambered into the fountain. After the tramp had washed his feet and his socks, he tip-toed over the gravel to the grass. Then he laid the socks out beside him to dry and snoozed with a plastic bag of rubbish for a pillow and a sandal in each hand.

Suddenly, as I sat there vegetating in the sunshine, out of nowhere all these little kids appeared. They swarmed all over me like rats, holding out their palms and tugging at my jacket. There were about ten of them, varying in age and height, but all with the same dark eyes and dirty faces, rotten teeth and tearful, pleading voices.

As the younger kids grabbed at me, the eldest, who I guess must have been about twelve or thirteen, got this piece of cardboard out. She knelt in front of me holding the cardboard over my lap like an empty plate and looked up with the same hungry eyes as that pinky brown puppy.

For a moment I felt quite sorry for her. I honestly did. But then, I felt something brush against my ankles. I couldn't work out what it was at first. But, as I peered down in puzzlement, the look of frustration on the girl's face (rather like that of a centre forward who has just missed an open goal) made me realise what was going on. All the time she'd been holding the piece of cardboard up to me, her free hand had been delving into the rucksack at my feet!

"Hey fuck off out of it," I said, pushing the girl back with a roughness which surprised me as much as it surprised her.

The girl spat in my face and snarled something (which, fortunately for both of us, I didn't understand). Then, all of a sudden, I saw that one of the other girls had my wallet in her hand. Luckily, I managed to grab hold of it just before she shoved it up her skirt.

"Hey, fucking give me that back you little bitch," I said gripping her wrist.

After a couple of moments of undignified tussling, I managed to prise the wallet free from her scratching fingers (albeit minus at least two intact notes and several torn fragments of varying value).

Meanwhile, as I'd leapt up from the bench, my almost empty packet of cheesy puffs had tumbled onto the ground, starting a feeding frenzy among the smaller kids. Having devoured the lot they gathered round me crying for more like a nestload of tattered fledglings. As I gently pushed them away I noticed the tallest of them was wearing a pair of sunglasses that looked remarkably similar to the pair I'd bought a few minutes earlier. It took me a couple of moments to realise that they actually were my sunglasses, reaching up to my forehead to confirm that they were no longer perched there.

"Oi, give those back you little bastard," I said chasing the boy round the bench as if playing some game at a seven-year-old's tea party. Bizarrely, the girl who a few moments earlier had been fighting with me for my wallet, snatched the sunglasses from the boys head and handed them back to me with an apologetic curtsy before slapping him with such force she actually knocked him over.

Thankfully, before things got any more complicated, a white three-wheeled van approached and the kids scampered off, shrieking, into the trees (like those manky pigeons fleeing that puppy).

Two men in beige overalls got out of the van and unwound a huge transparent hose which they attached to a tap by the fountain. The men dragged the hose like some enormous worm across the gravel path and started to water flower beds. I sat there, hunched forward, elbows in and head down like a cold man at prayer, carefully counting my money (feeling dark and greedy eyes watching through nearby trees).

I'm not very good with money (if I've got it I spend it, if I haven't I don't) and I couldn't really remember exactly how many thousand lire I'd had in the first place. But it didn't seem as if that girl had got away with very much. So I just shoved my wallet deep in my pocket and moved to another bench a couple of hundred yards away and tried to enjoy the last of the sunshine as clouds began to gather overhead.

Beside the new bench I'd moved to was a tree stump on which someone had drawn a delicate pastel rose - its heart a knot near the edge of the severed trunk. The rose was surrounded by graffiti written in silver and gold crayon, which reminded me of a cardiganed couple I'd once seen knelt on the floor of St Johns producing brass rubbing of mediaeval knights with whippets curled up around their pointed boots. I suddenly felt inspired to do some drawing myself, and decided to return to the hotel and collect my sketch pad and pencils.

I'd just crossed one of the little bridges that led out of the park when I saw the police cars, two of them parked close together at right angles, the bumper of one against the wing of the other, half-beneath an arcade on the far side of the big cobbled roundabout. I thought nothing much of it until I saw the puppy, the pink-brown puppy from the park, pissing against the back wheel of one of the police cars, tied to its bumper by that thick red lead.

At first I thought there had been some kind of accident - the lady with the boiled egg breasts and the cardigan dress, mowed down in her prime (or, to be honest, a little past her prime) by an out-of-control Alfa Romeo as she stumbled across the cobbles in her high heels. However, as I neared the parked police cars, I saw her very much alive and well, waving her arms about rather violently as she harangued a dark-uniformed man who stood solid and still as any of those statues at the park's edge, patiently listening to her.

It was not until I'd got right alongside the two parked cars that I saw the kids. If it hadn't been for the shining of their eyes I might never have noticed them - lined up against the wall in order of increasing height from the two-year-old to the tall girl still clutching her precious piece of cardboard, their dirty faces and clothes concealing them in the arcade's shadows, like a row of unkempt chameleons.

Towering over them were two policemen who reminded me of Laurel and Hardy. The podgy one (who clearly enjoyed his pasta) was holding the lady's patterned bag, the skinny one was questioning one of the older boys. I paused to watch from behind the bonnet of one of the police cars. Almost immediately, the skinny policeman stopped his questioning and gestured at me to move away, slapping the air with the back of his leather-gloved hand as if he were smacking the side of my face.

As I turned to go I caught the eye of the boy who'd stolen my sunglasses. He pretended to ignore me and spat noisily on the floor. The fat man who held the lady's bag flicked the boy's ear. The boy muttered something which sounded fairly insulting, but the fat man just laughed and slapped the side of the boy's face (which by this time must have been getting pretty bloody painful).

Entering the hotel lobby I met the bloke who had checked me in the previous night. He was about the same age as me, I guess, but much taller. He'd changed out of his hotel uniform (a white short-sleeved shirt with Albergo Ferrino embroidered in crimson silk on the breast pocket) and was wearing designer jeans, which were so stiffly pressed they looked as if they were fresh from a rack in a shop, and a hooded black sweat shirt. He'd just had a really severe pudding-bowl haircut. And with the black hood and everything he looked for all the world like some kind of trendy monk.

"Ciao," he said with a wink and a nod. "You look a bit in the weather today."

"In the what?"

"You say 'in the weather' or 'under the weather'?"

"Under the weather."

"Yes, yes, under the weather. It means you look a little bit sad, no?"

"Sort of....I just saw some of those little kids. You know, begging and stuff."

"Yes it is a big problem. We try to get rid of them but more come."

"I expect they don't have anywhere to go"

"Yes but it is a problem in London too, I think. When I was there I have seen people sleeping in boxes. But many of these people here they have houses. They prefer to beg instead of work. They make more money that way."

"The ones I saw didn't look that rich."

"If they looked rich would you give them money?"

"I know what you mean, but these kids were all scrawny, you know, skinny, with necks like chickens."

"Like chickens? Well, maybe they are really poor. There are some like that. It is a problem, but is the same in England, I think."

"Yea, it's the same everywhere, I guess."

"E vero."

Back up in my room I lay on the freshly made bed and peeled an orange. A smell of incense and Dettol left behind by the maids, mingled in the cool air with the sweet, citrus scent as I ate slowly, segment by segment and swigged what was left of the mineral water (which by then was only slightly fizzy).

I opened a clean page in my sketch book and started to draw a rose. It didn't turn out very well, so I turned it into a face, the face of the laughing girl in the pizza cafe. But I couldn't get her smile right and so decided to go out and explore the town some more.