At first sight, Raffaello was irresistible. We met one evening in the intoxicatingly romantic Piazza di Santa Maria in Trastevere. I was 19, he was a few years older, impeccably dressed, sprawled studiedly on the steps of the square’s bubbling fountain. He engineered a way to interrupt my friend and me – by asking for a cigarette, I think – and I allowed things to start from there. For a week or two he lived up to all that is desirable in the archetypal Italian man: he was solicitous and romantic, and his prerequisite limpid brown eyes were framed under an artfully achieved wave of lustrously dark hair that seemed to demand that I run my fingers through it. That coiffure was almost supernaturally perfect, remaining in place even when he removed his helmet after our dizzying rides through Rome on his Lambretta.

His looks were a cross between Paolo Maldini (still, today, a burning crush) and one of Michelangelo’s putti from the Sistine Chapel. He spent his days working towards his law degree, and his evenings enchanting me. He drank in moderation. My boyfriends in London were never like this. I was besotted. It wasn’t l’amore, but it was dizzying nonetheless. True, he lived at home. And yes, his mother was clearly a dominant figure in his life. I found that hilarious, but I never let him know it.

The evening that Raffaello lost his place in my heart started normally enough. But when we were briefly caught in a surprise summer rain-storm as we returned to my apartment (I was not living with my mother), he became strangely agitated. We did not linger as we often did in the shadowy corridors or the lush courtyard garden on the way through the building to my door. Instead, he marched ahead, his leather-soled shoes rapping urgently against the marble floor. As soon as we were inside he turned to me, his face pale and fixed: “Darling, let me borrow your hairdryer.” True, that hot cherubic wave had been flattened by the rain, but this request seemed more than a little vain.

But the hairdryer was not for his hair. It was for his precious shoes. They were new, he said, from Grilli (a very fine leather-goods shop), and his mother would be appalled if they were ruined. Anyway, did I know that blowdrying was the best way to set the shoe-polish? And, in fact, did I have some shoe polish that he could borrow?

Raffaello taught me a lesson. He was my only fling with an Italian man. There’s nothing more attractive than a clean-cut, well-turned-out man who’s fastidiously groomed and smells amazing. And the vast majority of nice young Italian men fit that bill. The problem is that they look so good only because their mothers ensure they cut a bella figura. The fiendish genius of the Italian mother is to boost her son’s sense of self-esteem to such an extent that by the time he’s in his prime he’s so full of himself that he’d be impossible to live with. Hence the mother ensures sovereignty over her little king far beyond its natural childhood reign.

So Raffaello was my only Italian boyfriend, but for much of my life I’ve lived with another Italian male: my father. He’s handsome, chivalrous, fiercely protective, demonstrative and generous with his time and his money, and offers unconditional love. But he’s quite a handful. Once, in Perugia, when I was 15, he dragged me into the local office of the carabinieri to demand, in all seriousness, that they “do something about” some boys outside who had wolf-whistled at me as we went past.

British men would do well to emulate the typical Italian man’s passion for his family, but the downside is that it is far rarer for married Italian women to have platonic male friends than it is here – the husbands’ ego won’t tolerate the competition. Richard Owen’s dispatch suggests, however, that change is afoot, that women in Italy are standing up for themselves a little at last, and this can only be a positive move – no matter how wounding it is for their spouses.

One thing that I suspect will never change is the frankness of the sexual appraisal any attractive woman encounters walking down a crowded Italian street. But at least women there are unlikely to be lusted after as crassly as they are here. In Rome an admiring gentleman might say “Nice dress”. Here, he says “Nice tits”. Where’s the imagination in that?