No wonder the Tuscans are depressed; they are overrun by the British

The British may be saving Iraq, but are they ruining Tuscany? A survey covering 25 Italian cities has found that Tuscans came out top in the depression stakes.

Given the popularity of the region with the British, the issue cannot be dismissed as just another foreign news in brief: gloomy Florentines and Pisans will affect your next stay in Chiantishire. It's worse: as one of the 100,000-plus Brits who regularly make their way to this corner of Italy, you may actually be responsible for the region's depression.

Playing host to Tony and Cherie, Neil Kinnock, Sting and their ilk is bound to leave the Tuscan feeling down. Whether they are expats, second-homers (30,000 Britons have bought a house in Tuscany) or mere visitors, Britons have driven up house prices, congested cities and turned a once proud region into a prettily pasteurised backdrop for film directors or novelists. Tuscans like to think of themselves as the descendants of the de' Medicis and da Vincis, but the image they see reflected in their British visitors' eyes is more pedestrian: the inspiration for River Cafe cooking, the site of the House of Gucci, the best place to buy those brilliant postcards of ancient masterpieces that make such nice thank you notes.

If being made to feel banal were not enough to cast down their spirits, Tuscans also have to put up with Britons' ideological sins. Tuscans are "red" - during the 1990s, when Forza Italia transformed the Italian political scene, their electoral behaviour remained surprisingly unchanged, revealing what the sociologist Francesco Ramella called "a persistent allegiance to a communist subculture". In their eyes, the Blairites who every summer descend like locusts upon their homeland are traitors to the cause. They go in for ideological dilutions, contortions and compromises that smack of the tax dodger (a familiar figure in Italy) bent on avoiding coughing up.

The Tuscans watch incredulously as Tony Blair rubs shoulders with their hate figure, Silvio Berlusconi; and as for the Blairite support for the war - it was quite unacceptable to Tuscans, who marched in Rome in their thousands on 15 February. That such ideologically shady characters may now join the euro (according to Peter Mandelson, one Briton who seems to prefer Copacabana Beach to Chiantishire) makes the Tuscan heart sink. Bring on the Prozac!

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