As is the case whenever I return from abroad I high-tail it to the library and pick out whatever stock they have on the country or region I've just been to.

In the case of Milan, well, all the local libraries, here and in the City where I work, are pretty light on coverage, Naples and Sicily, on the other hand, are much richer seams; serious fiction, crime, travelogues, histories, memoirs abound. So it's these two parts of Italy that I've been reading about.

Earlier this evening, lazing on a bench in the same idle grandeur that an adult walrus basks on the beach, I came to the end of "Falling Palace", Dan Hofstadter's lyrical, often bittersweet, portrait of his extended stays in Naples.

It's a Naples of melancholy. Every corner seems shaded, occasionally with joy, more often languor, an odd sadness. It is compelling writing, to the degree that I could easily draw a sketch of it's tiny streets, abrupt dead ends, crumbling palazzi, it has a ghostly life shadow that fell over me as I read it.

His Naples is rueful, riddled with ambiguity, things are held at a distance, yet the other side of this peculiar coin, is a city that toil incessantly, everyone has another job, a sideline in something else; it's noisy, a blanket of noise that lulls people to sleep. the city is magical. I have to go.

This strange, haunting, what-if mood draws so much of it's odd potency from Hofstadter's elusive and quixotic relationship with the very complex Benedetta, his enigmatic, puzzling, gregarious, yearning, wonderfully gestural girlfriend.

I could see Benedetta very easily. I have met two women, one Italian, the other French, who have weaved spells over me, spun me into a similar webs to those that Hofstadter intimates Benedetta (is this really her name? There's more than echo of Dante's beloved Beatrice in it).

Ask me what colour mood this intimate recollection is and I say blue, the blue of wistfulness, gentle regret, sadness. Very much the way I feel when I think of each of these two women especially the one I could never properly commit to. You know who you are.