Italy is a land of beauty and death

I was nine. It was Florence, mid-July. My parents were bravely leading my younger brother and me through a sweaty day of sightseeing. We had just walked up and down the Duomo and were cooling off with ice cream in an adjacent square when there was a terrible bang. At first we thought it was an explosion. Then, as we drove past the Duomo again a few minutes later, we saw something so gruesome that I still remember it with a shudder: paramedics were trying to lift a stretcher covered with a white sheet into the ambulance, and on the floor was a huge blob of what looked like spaghetti sauce. It took me a moment to realize what it was and what it had to do with the bang, and then I couldn't get my mind off it.

Many years later, I travelled to Italy – the most intoxicating and alluring part of Europe – and had more encounters with tragedy and death. Perhaps this is the inevitable result of all this beauty, glory and passion. On a recent trip to Trieste, there was a man who took a funny turn in the water and died a few minutes later, three chairs in front of me, while paramedics, who had to walk half a mile along a narrow, rocky quay, struggled to save him. In the spring, a friend's brother died while swimming on the beach in Sicily, where the house of Inspector Montalbano – the famous TV detective from Ragusa – is set. There are more such stories.

And so I could not escape the strange, tragic and – many believe – unexplained death of tech tycoon Mike Lynch and several of his companions, including his 18-year-old daughter Hannah, who was going to Oxford, and Jonathan Bloomer, the international chairman of Morgan Stanley, in a storm off the coast of Porticello in Sicily. Lynch had a beautiful 183-foot yacht called Bayesian to celebrate his recent acquittal in a £5 billion US fraud trial relating to the sale of his company Autonomy to Hewlett Packard. (In a seemingly bizarre coincidence, his co-defendant Mike Chamberlain was run over and killed in Cambridgeshire just two days before Lynch's boat sank.)

A freak waterspout hit right where Lynch's yacht – whose mast was taller than the Cenotaph – was moored. Porticello's security cameras show the raw power of the storm. It is almost supernatural. People are shocked by such sudden fury in August, considered a weary, silent month in the Mediterranean. And yet I know from my time in Sicily that the violence of change chronicled in this haunting story – the dreamy sunset captured by the Bayesian's deck, a few hours before all hell broke loose – that's just how it is there, no matter what month.

Those who go to Sicily in spring, summer or autumn do not expect deluges. And yet those who approach the shimmering old island with no regard for meteorological dangers (not to mention the Mafia) are dangerously wrong. In the six or so times I have been to Sicily I have experienced more wind and rain, more waves crashing wildly over the breakwaters and raised coastal paths, than in an entire winter in England. The intensity is breathtaking. I was in Syracuse – my usual place of residence – during a cyclone one October and the ancient Spartan city that had so vigorously repelled the Athenians in 500 BC was now dangerously divided by fallen electricity pylons and sparking wires; I could not see my friend who lived just across the causeway. People were dying.

Many writers have been confronted with the same wild world of Italian tragedy and beauty. There is Thomas Mann's Death in Veniceabout plague and suicidal pedophilia; Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa The Leopardabout the brutal Risorgimento in Sicily; the Elena Ferrante Quartet about friends in Naples in the 1950s who have to endure unspeakable violence in their childhood (in the midst of moments of joy); The Garden of the Finzi-Continisthe quiet classic by Giorgio Bassani about a rich family who leaves their villa in Ferrara and goes to Auschwitz. Maybe not as sophisticated, but I was also a fan of Ian McEwan's early novel The kindness of strangersabout terrible things happening to an English tourist couple on an Italian lagoon. In real Italy, the sight of ambulances and emergency services frantically revving up is strangely familiar. We've all seen those images of the coffins piled up in Bergamo in February 2020. Death finds you in Italy, that's how it often feels.

The Lynch story unfolds as gothic, labyrinthine and haunting as any set in Italy or Sicily – a lesson for anyone who thinks the seductress of southern Europe is just a pleasure palace. She might as well be a chamber of hell.