I’ve just got back from a couple of weeks’ holiday and, boy oh boy, am I glad to be back. I swear, that was Italy’s last chance. I am not going to fall for it again. All that rubbish about lovely fresh food, charming people, casual, tumbledown restaurants in the shadow of ancient ruins, bambini frolicking between the tables, linguine cooked so al dente you could pick a padlock with it, ooh, darling the tomatoes, the tinkle of pinot grigio hitting a rustic old tumbledown tumbler, simple grilled meats, ooh, darling the mozzarella, the very pepper-grinder that gave Shelley the idea for Ozymandias, ooh darling, the zucchini flowers poached in the tears of a gryphon…

It is all rubbish. I was in Rome for a week and then in the Tuscan countryside outside Lucca – the very model of the 21st-century bourgeois holiday idyll – and almost all the Italians I encountered were cheap, tacky swindlers who couldn’t cook.

I know you’ll all write in to tell me that the best Italian food is not to be found in restaurants, and that Italians eat best at home. Well, so do I. But I have to go on holiday sometimes. You will tell me that the best places are off the beaten track, little brown places with no sign which you wouldn’t even know was a restaurant unless you were a local. Yes, well, I am not a bloody local. And I am not Marco frigging Polo either. I have to go to places with signs.

I stayed at a place called the Hotel de Russie. It was meant, according to at least two guidebooks, to be the best hotel in Rome. Ha!

I booked three months in advance and chose a “view of the garden” as opposed to a “view of the city”. But when we arrived (me and some random flopsy), they put us in a room at the end of a dark corridor, fully three days’ walk from reception, with a view only of a wall. A cellar of a room. A room so mean and dark and lifeless I think Gollum would have called in the decorators.

They had clearly seen an unfamiliar name in the book, grasped I was English (hawk, spit, flick my teeth at you), and told the chambermaid, “Clean out the broom closet, Maria, the Corens are coming.”

I said it would not do. They said it was all they had. I said that they had specifically promised me a view of the garden. They said they had not. And then I said that, if they did not give me a room with at least some natural light, I would leave. And still they said that was all they had. So I told them to call me a taxi. And so they gave me a great room on the top floor, windows on two sides and beautiful views.

Goddam, that sort of thing makes me angry: to provide rubbish as a default until the difficult people hit the roof, and let the nice ones go screw themselves. It’s how you fill the world with Michael Winners.

Next morning at breakfast, same thing. Lovely sun-dappled garden restaurant, buongiorno, buongiorno, ah, English, have a seat here at the cutlery station where the waiters stack all the old plates and the birds come and crap on your lap, after all, you’re only paying 800 quid a night (a monstrous error – when I booked I honestly thought that was for the five nights).

Breakfast was included with the room unless you had hot food (yes, I know, who in the world would expect to get a hot breakfast for only 800 quid?). So the flopsy and I ordered scrambled eggs each and two pieces of bacon. Only when I went to pay the bill at the end (at reception, surrounded by dead-eyed staff, searching over my shoulder for fat viscontis in pale jeans and sockless lizard loafers to slime up to) did I discover that eggs and bacon for two had cost me 87 euros. Seventy-five quid for two plates of bacon and eggs. And we’d done it every morning.

We sent some laundry to be done: two shirts, a pair of shorts, three pairs of pants, some socks. 220 euros. £180. At least three times the value of the clothes themselves. The pants were not even badly soiled, as this was before I knew how much the room cost.

We went to some restaurants. Couple of decent pasta dishes but otherwise, rubbish. These people not only have never heard of vegetables, but have no idea how to cook meat – it was all so overdone, so brown, so whiffy… “So dead,” grunted the flopsy, who doesn’t usually talk with her mouth full.

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