At the whim of Hollywood, a fountain was placed in the main piazza. It featured a naked man with an enormous penis, which caused consternation among the local women
This Sunday I am going on BBC4's The Big Read to defend Lord of the Rings against the assaults of John Walsh, the man many believe to be the model for my best-loved character, Ivo Sponge. This isn't going to be easy. Walsh is a brilliant wit who behaved in such a noble way over his supposed alter ego that he now ranks as one of my favourite people in the media. But there remains the problem of loving an author that you aren't supposed to rate at all as a literary person. For years, I have brought north London dinner parties to a halt by declaring my unabashed admiration for Tolkien. This could indirectly be because, when I was 20, I modelled for Alan Lee's illustrations of Galadriel and Eowyn in the one-volume edition of Lord of the Rings. But what I really love is its depiction of how ordinary, unheroic people - the Hobbits - can do extraordinarily heroic things. It's the only epic that is not about an elite. Perhaps that's what the elite hate about it.
The only other woman writer I know who loves Tolkien is A S Byatt, who recently launched a de haut en bas attack on the Harry Potter books. I get very fed up with writers attacking other writers, especially J K Rowling. It's a bit like the left: petty differences in style make us enemies, while the barbarians knock at the gate. Women, I regret to say, have been particularly bad at recognising how counterproductive spite is.
About two years ago, however, Kathy Lette and I set up what is now known as "the pub salon" for women novelists. For those of us with young children, it's one of the few times we can get out and meet, even if our freedom to discuss the Brontes and bikini waxes entails formidable feats of organisation - something I bet Martin Amis or Will Self never has to worry about. What is peculiar is how threatened the salon's existence makes men of letters feel. Roger Alton, editor of the Observer, tried to gatecrash it this year and was promptly ejected. Soon after, a sniffy piece appeared in his paper's Pendennis column, about how we were just a dismal self-help group. Ho, ho. A typical evening now features various disgruntled male authors nursing their solitary beers and a sense of injustice downstairs, while upstairs rings with fierce, Bacchanalian laughter.
A real-life bacchante is presumably enjoying a rather unusual memento of Cortona, the Tuscan hill-town where my latest novel is set, and where Ivo Sponge is due to reappear. Cortona has become famous thanks to Frances Mayes's bestseller Under the Tuscan Sun. Her memoir was recently filmed, and those who know the place will be startled to see a fountain where no fountain was, placed in the main piazza at the whim of Hollywood. Featuring a naked man with an enormous penis, it caused consternation among local women, who felt it was indecent. One night, the statue was castrated, to the fury of the local men, who, according to my parents, feel this to be an insult to their manhood. The fate of the offending member remains a mystery.
There's something about Tuscany at present that brings people out in lumps, even if they aren't German. Tony Blair never made a bigger error than when he revealed how he adores it and, this week, half the women in cabinet are due to arrive at a villa near Perugia for a politician's holiday.
Hacks are already sharpening their skewers at this supposedly sybaritic choice of destination. Why? Unlike France, which has thousands of large, spacious farmhouses built by prosperous farmers, the case of Chiantishire were built by desperately poor tenant farmers who, exploited by vicious and greedy landlords, left in droves in the 1950s. The rooms are narrow, dark and dank, the plumbing a trickle, and the dried-up grass like shards of glass. You can't flush the loos, insects are rife and it is hideously expensive. The art, thanks to heat and queues, is unattainable. Yes, the views are heavenly, but having grown up in Italy, I have my family holidays where sensible folk do: in beautiful, unenvied France. Tuscany is best kept for fiction.
Amanda Craig's new novel, Love in Idleness, is published on 28 July by Little, Brown
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