Among the multiple causes of Graham’s disconnection from Italian scenes one might count his unconcern with aesthetic pleasures important to many who visit the peninsula. Evelyn Waugh, who, in the aftermath of the Second World War, regretted having neglected Europe during his youthful travels of the 1920s and ’30s, later wrote that restless young British writers of his generation had deludedly imagined that

Europe could wait. There would be time for Europe . . . These were the years when Mr. Peter Fleming went to the Gobi Desert, Mr. Graham Greene to the Liberian hinterland; Robert Byron . . . to the ruins of Persia. We turned our back on civilisation. Had we known, we might have lingered . . . Had we known that all that seeming-solid, patiently built, gorgeously ornamented structure of Western life was to melt overnight like an ice castle . . . Instead, we set off on our various stern roads; I to the Tropics and the Arctic . . . At that time it seemed an ordeal, an initiation to manhood.