Dei ex machinae

This article is taken from the October 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £25.

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Dei ex machinae

“Italy has the worst museums in the world. The best collections, but the worst museums.” The source must remain anonymous, but the statement is spot on — many of the state-run museums here are incompetently run, beset by union issues and seemingly interested in preventing the public from enjoying art. Given Italy’s unparalleled artistic heritage, they are the curatorial equivalent of sending Rodri onto the pitch in lead boots. 

An exception is the Centrale Montemartini in Rome, housed in a former power plant, which I visited for the first time this summer. It’s the second repository for the Capitoline collection of sculpture and artefacts, and the juxtaposition of monumental industrial machinery and exquisitely imperious Roman deities unforgettably transforms the way one considers both. The space also houses the original Popemobile, the splendidly regal Papal train, built for Pius IX in 1859, complete with a travelling chapel, throne room and “Balconata”, a gilded open wagon from which His Holiness could dispense blessings.

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Guidebooks or, more likely, phones, provide instantaneous description of museums or monuments, but what about the witchy feeling of reading about a place you are in? “Oleanders leaned over a flat layer of rock across which the sea flowed with just enough impetus to net the surface with a frail white reticulation of foam … a small distance from the shore a miniature mole ran out … bearing a whitewashed church and a miniature ruined fort.” 

The passage is from Patrick Leigh Fermor’s Mani, which I read whilst looking at said church and miniature fort (now transformed into my fantasy house) on the beach at Kardamyli in the Peloponnese, and the word is daseinlesen, read existence, as explained by the composer Tom Smail, who lives with his novelist wife Alba Arikha in the steep foothills of the Taygetus mountains. 

In true PLF style I met them through an old-fashioned letter of introduction when I went to spend a month in Kardamyli. Terrifyingly brilliant, polyglot and immensely kind to a rather shabby stranger, they made me feel as though I was living in one of Paddy’s books, whether listening to Tom’s Morias, a haunting ode to the Peloponnese for ten musicians which premiered in Athens last year, discovering the tomato and saffron fritters at Old Kardamili restaurant in the Byzantine village or hearing Alba’s impromptu piano recital in Equinox bookshop. I’m a huge fan of Alba’s last book, Two Hours, and will definitely be in London next February for the premiere of her play Spanish Oranges at the Playground Theatre.

No wonder the Kardamyli literary festival in October is the gig writers fight to get. It’s a bewitching place, which still feels somehow out of time: “unlike any village I had seen in Greece. These houses, resembling small castles built of golden stone with pepper-pot turrets, were topped by a fine church … I felt like staying there forever.” Looking across the silvery vastness of the Ionian towards Kythira from Tom and Alba’s terrace at sunset, with a single fishing boat whittled down by the light to the bare strokes of a child’s drawing in charcoal and the coyotes singing in the hills behind, so did I. 

Heavenly habits

The church at Kardamyli is dedicated to the Dormition of the Virgin, translated charmingly for visitors as “Our Blessed Lady Falling Asleep”, the feast of which is 15 August.

I found myself explaining this whilst filming a show on royal births and deaths for Channel 5 in a blustery St James’ Park. Doing history for telly gets ever more daunting; the field of one’s presumed expertise expands as budgets shrink. Luckily, I was well up on the Dormition and the cult of birthing girdles, based on the account of the sash worn by Mary when she was assumed into heaven, which she personally passed to St Thomas (of doubting fame) as she ascended. 

In 1246, Richard Crokesley, the abbot of Westminster, brought the very same girdle — somehow it had ended up in Gascony — to Henry III’s queen, Eleanor of Provence, to succour her in childbed. The Westminster monks promised eleven years of remission from Purgatory to anyone who worshipped the girdle, though the Queen herself reportedly favoured a discreet tincture of opium. 

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Italians celebrate the Dormition on ferragosto by compulsory beach-going, which makes 15 August the worst day of the year for a swim at the Venice Lido. By 9am the crammed vaporetti were dangerously low in the water, though no one actually drowned in the Bidet of the Adriatic this time. 

I ventured out in the evening to hear “Bach Reimagined”, a spectacular concert by the Karavan Ensemble, a 45-minute dialogue between violinists Lorenzo Gatto and Ambi Subermaniam, who riffed on the Partita No. 2 in D minor and classical Indian ragas. Summer in Venice can be beastly but I do love the elegant tradition of using fans, for both men and women. The concert was packed, but languid flutterings kept everyone cool, adding a suitable breath of the baroque to the music.

The big Venetian event of the summer was supposedly the Bezos wedding, though the press caused far more disruption than the billionaires. Much was made of the anti-Amazon protests (I confess I got two commissions out of them), which forced Jeff and his buoyant bride to relocate their reception to the Arsenale. Apt that one of the world’s richest men ended up celebrating his marriage in an abandoned warehouse. Venetians were far more interested in the Emily in Paris shoot, which began on ferragosto, much to the disgust of the Comune’s representatives, who had to swap their Speedos for suits to greet the stars.