The international tour of the two Italian tenors Claudio Mattioli and Max Barbolini (both from Modena, and Pavarotti's pupils) continues on Monday 24th February, and is also exciting opera fans in Kenya. Tomorrow they will be at the new Terrazza, the delightful restaurant that Murielle and Stefano have opened in the Westlands district of Nairobi.

It's an interesting opportunity to hear them live, even if it seems that the Terrace has been fully booked for the last two weeks. (The truth is that opera aficionados flock to these events like ducks to water. La vie en rose, as Edith Piaf would have sung!).

The Terrace Event is sponsored and coordinated by Vinyasa, the dynamic and innovative company in Malindi that exclusively imports Italian food excellences, including the Mezzacorona wines that give the gastronomic title to the evening. Mezzacorona has been producing the highest quality wine since 1904, and it is interesting to note that Italian food and opera are two sides of the same coin, that of being Italians with good taste and excellence in all fields (as a wise man once said: what would our country be without emphasis?).

This, forgive us for the cultural reference, reminds us of what Herodotus wrote millennia ago, giving a definition of identity that is still extraordinarily relevant today. All the Hellenics were in a moment of great danger for Greece, attacked and invaded by the endless army of the Persian king Xerxes. The Spartans feared that Athens, threatened from nearby, could break away from the Greek alliance and seek an agreement with the Persians, but the Athenians reassured them: ‘We will never betray you: we have a common language, religious faith, culture; this “being Greek” (to Hellenikòn, in Greek) of ours makes us all an indissoluble community’.

We Italians have in common an indissoluble passion for good taste, football and beautiful things, and if every now and then we melancholically and nostalgically think of the good old days, let's remember that there is an antidote to that melancholy in our eyes, and it's called the future.