Halfway through Sean Mathias’s gripping new production of The Syndicate, Ian McKellen’s Don Antonio Barracano reaches for his hat, stick and gloves and heads out through the olive groves to "make [a man] an offer". He looks and sounds like a nice old gent setting out for an afternoon stroll. Unless, of course, you’re passingly acquainted with The Godfather.

Programmes about Italian organised crime made by the foreign media are always hampered by the finnicky nature of the beast itself: there is so much background detail that needs to be staked out at the outset that your head is whirling from information overload. Like its mainstream political parties, high-street banks and national daily newspapers, Italy has three, four or five times as many of each as any other European country of similar size.

The extraordinary Longborough Opera Festival is with us again and for the next six weeks, in Martin and Lizzie Graham’s Palladian barn theatre near Stow-on-the-Wold. This year the world’s unlikeliest Ring cycle reaches Siegfried. But the improbability doesn’t end with Wagner; there is also Verdi (Falstaff) and Mozart – also, typically, a cyclic project, which has arrived at Così fan tutte. The whole set-up is so amazing that one longs to be enthusiastic about everything. But that can sometimes be difficult.

“There is a sense I very much get about this place. Italians know what life is for and they know it won’t last very long. And so they take advantage. I like that. Particularly at my age.” The last of several times I interviewed the British crime writer Michael Dibdin (1947-2007) was four years before his death. It was a freezing February morning in Bologna, where he was researching the 10th and (it turned out) penultimate book in the Aurelio Zen series. The interview was at 9am. In the fug of a crowded bar, Dibdin soaked up several espressi and a warming tot of grappa.

Mount Vesuvius blew its top in 1631, spewing molten lava into the sea and filling the air with ash clouds that reached as far as Constantinople. The eruption and accompanying earthquakes killed 3,000 people and caused widespread devastation, all of which made a lasting impression on the 16–year-old Salvator Rosa. As an artist he was to specialise in darkly tempestuous landscapes filled with menace in which small figures are dwarfed by towering cliffs, or beset by bandits, while storm clouds gather over ruined buildings and blasted trees.