Giuseppe Verdi, the country’s passionate national composer, put it best when he said: “You may have the universe if I may have Italy.” Having lived in five other European countries, I can personally attest to the fact that Italians remain uniquely adept at the art of living life.

The pre-eminent 19th-century American transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau had a thing for the regenerative power of swamps. As he put it: “A town is saved, not more by the righteous men in it, than by the woods and swamps that surround it.”