People who remember the young Albanian – part of the Kosovan refugee community welcomed as cheap labour by many of the wine estates – who, as the shops were getting ready to close two years ago, was stabbed under the picturesque loggia only 10 yards from where I was enjoying my wine. No one saw a fight; he collapsed and died outside the town priest’s house among the late shoppers as they were making their final purchases. His body wasn’t even noticed for half an hour.By the following morning, the man’s compatriot friends and flat-mates had all disappeared, terrified of what the carabinieri would do to them. The town priest had something new to preach about – he warned the population to beware the ungodly Muslims – but the police had little to go on and the case was quietly dropped; they have enough to worry about in this part of Tuscany.Drug abuse is endemic: in the decade I spent here, I met an eight-year-old who had to become self-sufficient, getting himself to school and cooking his own meals because his parents were too out of it on opiates. One of my friends – famous for having a heroin habit stronger than his bank balance – vanished for several days. When he reappeared, he was hobbling around on crutches; both his legs had been broken.

He’d got into difficulties, he told me, while riding a horse.The British helped give drugs such as heroin an early start in Chianti. Vastly outnumbered now by Americans and Germans, the aristocratic and bohemian British were the first foreigners to settle here in numbers during the 1960s and 1970s, and it is one of the few places in mainland Europe where they still rush headlong into alcoholic self-destruction. Some had children who spent holidays from London at their parents’ villas and farmhouses, flaunting their urban sophistication and taste for drugs. It was as if the children of the local population, less than a decade out of the feudal sharecropping system, had no immunity to a disease brought by these settlers.

It was all irresistibly exotic, and in one recent summer there were several overdoses in the Greve area, one fatal.The kind of article that I came across in the Standard appears often, and is part of a pattern that has been continuing for decades. It gives the impression that these small Tuscan towns are caught in a time warp and forgotten by the rest of the world. Greve council’s latest idea – marketing the town as part of the “Slow City” movement – is merely its most recent incarnation. The population of the town is, on the whole, baffled by the expression, and the only definitions I could find were that “it isn’t McDonald’s” and “it’s about slow times”. If this makes you think of locals passing the day at caf?ables lost in bucolic reverie, remember that the old men who spend hours nursing their grappa have effectively been banned from all but two of the town’s eight bars – they don’t buy enough and they scare off the tourists.A month ago a confused writer from Stern magazine walked into my sister-in-law’s trompe-l’oeil studio in the piazza with two photographers, worried that he’d come to the wrong town. The journalist was under the impression that he ought to be in an Amish-style community where there were virtually no cars, and was disappointed to find the piazza so full of the most expensive German machinery.Returning to Greve after a three month absence, I found frantic activity in the town centre. Preparations for taking advantage of the tourists during the coming season were in full swing, with new bars and restaurants being built and existing ones expanded But not everyone welcomes the tourists.

I have an Italian friend who dreads the arrival at his landlord’s villa of a certain very, very famous English politician and his family. In order for these visitors not to have to suffer the indignity of low water pressure, my friend’s water supply is disconnected for the duration of their stay. Every time he goes to work, to the shops, or to fill his water canisters at the local stand-pipe, he is stopped and questioned by the police and secret services, who also search his car.The forces of law and order don’t spend all their time combating drug abuse and protecting the rich They are on hand from the moment you land at Pisa airport. But although I have arrived there dozens of times, the only people I have ever seen have their luggage searched have been black. This is one of many respects in which Tuscany doesn’t live up to its travel-section stereotype, some of which are investigated in a new three-part series on Channel 4, Tuscany, which starts on Sunday. The first programme covers the exorcism of a country girl in a village near Lucca.”The reason people around here live so long,” the Evening Standard proclaimed, “is they never stop working.” Giovanni, a 35-year-old farm manager, shakes his head in amazement at this.