For several years now my wife and I have spent part of the summer in rural Tuscany, sometimes in the picture-postcard mountain countryside above Fiesole, deep in what the British (whose current prime minister regularly holidays there), like to call Chianti-shire, but more recently in the hills of the western Maremma, miles from the tourist route. In this less glamorous though still lovely agricultural region, almost nobody speaks anything but Italian and, by and large, foreign ...