I Misteri d'Italia

Mr Cameron, the occluded laird who heads This Great Coalition of Ours, let us all down with his gauche refusal to tip a Tuscan waitress.

The young lady told the prime minister she was too busy to carry his cups of coffee out onto the terrace. In primary-school pique he withheld the 150,000,000 lire she might have expected to find stacked under a saucer. Perhaps she should have been grateful that he didn't scoop up the loose change left on neighbouring tables and wheelbarrow it away to keep Mr Osborne quiet.

I see little point in allowing aristocrats back into power unless they show the world how to behave. We might as well have stuck with Mr Brown, who would not only have tipped correctly with the help of a slide-rule but might even have taken the used cups back to the kitchen.

But remember where we are. This isn't Greece, where you can wander around dressed like a refugee yet still get a slap-up fish grill. This isn't Spain, where the locals have set up zones of tolerance for the English and their deep-fried ways. This is Italy, and Mr Cameron not only broke some of its most fearsome laws, but fundamentally missed the point.

Italy, like the bumblebee, shouldn't get off the ground but it does. It seems anarchic:

• no one pays taxes;
• the South is run by the Corleones;
• the rest is run by a priapic TV mogul;
• buildings look as if they were recently strafed by a vengeful Ethopian air force; and
• post a letter and three months later Il Postino may disentangle himself from your wife long enough to piss in the pillar box then set it alight.

And yet it's an excellent place to live. Why? Because Italy is Schelling's nightmare and Germany's antithesis - instead of elemental chaos boiling beneath a crust of civility, you have a rigidly conformist society that charms the world with its raffish air. The locals work hard to bring you the illusion of languor.

Italians travel relatively little, not only because they already live in Paradise but because we clearly see their Shinto uniformity when the Bel Paese spell is broken. Remember the plug of identically-kitted language students blocking the exit of the Tube carriage, or the Knightsbridge boutiques selling a sort of silken tweed and cavalry twill only worn in Milan.

The Italians do their best to shield the tourist from the secret mechanisms of their society. You can eat and drink whenever you like, padding about their cities with your trainers, singlets and water bottles, as if you were about to enter a bumpkin marathon. They say nothing, but have already silently allocated you a status just below lunatic and a little above leper.

Other European countries also understand that first impressions are always right, but play fair by letting you know about it. A lady friend popped out in her tracksuit to buy a pint of milk on Vienna's Graben, and still winces at the memory of trudging home with matrons pointing her out to their amused but wary grandchildren.

Dress like that in Paris and a foie gras seller may ask whether you've lost your house keys while nervously beckoning to the gendarme.

The Italians have no intention of sharing their social miracle with passing trade. Let us never know that the crumbling façade conceals a polished palazzo. But once in a while a kindly Etruscan may break ranks and tactfully try to tempt the wanderer into fare bella figura.

Mr Cameron's waitress was one such Samaritan. The prime minister thought he was simply ordering a couple of cappuccinos, a milky beverage that's conquered the world but which in Italy is spooned into infants. No one takes milk in their coffee after breakfast.

Most Italian cafés will gladly churn this out for the tee-shirted barbarians, but our waitress must have taken pity on Mr Cameron. By bearing the cappuccinos to his table in the late morning she would have exposed him and the willowy Mrs Cameron as little better than Dutchmen.

By feigning preoccupation she left Mr Cameron to carry the cups himself. A strolling local would then have taken the prime minister, with his crumpled shirt and bizarre shoes, to be an anæmic Albanian beggar earning a few florins by ferrying froth to some backpackers, and thought no ill of him.

An English gentleman would have learned enough Apennine ways on his Grand Tour to have instinctively understood the waitress's selfless gesture. But she overestimated Mr Cameron, who would have done better to take Isak Dinesen's Seven Gothic Tales, in particular The Roads Round Pisa, as his holiday reading rather than the usual dim volume of American social philosophy. Truly was it said that no good turn goes unpunished.

I was once lucky enough to see a chip in the lacquer, and appreciated how tartly Italians treat their errant own. I was at Bologna airport, whiling away the minutes before my flight over an espresso. A 30-something man, clearly Italian, dressed, pressed and crimped with designer shades, man-bag and tender shoes, nodded to the waitress and asked for a macchiato - an espresso with a gust of hot milk.

It was two o'clock in the afternoon.

The waitress paused. He repeated his order with a pleasant smile, but might as well have asked her to top the cup up from her own tawny teats. The rest of us pretended to read our Calvino novels, but every plucked and vaselined eyebrow was arched in his direction.

The waitress nodded, approached the coffee dragon - Claudia Cardinale's jilted and unforgiving aunt - and gave the order. The dragon cast a glance at the cheery customer, grunted and made him an espresso. She set it aside and let the waitress bustle about until the fool's flight was called. Only then did he get his coffee, with no time to collect his change.

We saw nothing. Thus does Italy guard her secrets. Silendo libertatem servo.