Giovanni

This is not a picture of Giovanni. It is in fact the late Italian fashion designer Nino Cerruti but Giovanni looked rather like him - with a full head of silver hair and a twinkle in his eye.

I met Giovanni last Thursday morning outside the Arenella Resort Hotel. He was going to be our Sicilian tour guide on our coach trip to Mount Etna and Taormina. Around his neck, he wore an identity badge showing a much younger Giovanni when his hair was jet black. He had clearly been a tour guide for a long time.

Aboard our bus there were a dozen British holidaymakers, a dozen French and perhaps two dozen Italians. This meant that Giovanni had to broadcast his tour guide spiel in three languages. He moved between English, French and Italian like a dragonfly flitting between lilypads so that the three languages seemed to intertwine.

It soon became clear that he only had a rudimentary knowledge of both English and French but his delivery was supremely confident and jovial. Much of the time we had little idea what he was saying as he grasped the microphone like Perry Como, talking about vegetables, lemons, tunnels and a petro-chemical  plant that we sped by. "Eet iza shit!" he declared.

It was all off the cuff and lacking in interesting detail. Sometimes he conversed with two Italian passengers at the front of the bus - forgetting that his microphone was still switched on.

I think that in his home environment Giovanni would be a great host, a good friend and an excellent grandfather. He exuded  a certain joie de vivre that's for sure but as an effective tour guide he left much to be desired.

When our bus finally reached Sapienza Refuge on the slopes of Mount Etna, Giovanni insisted that everyone on board should follow him to a particular cafe on the edge of things where we could get refreshment and visit the toilet but he failed to say when we should re-assemble at the coach.

The following day I asked another day tripper what she had thought of Giovanni. She was called Helen and she lives in the suburbs of Glasgow. She replied rather bluntly, "He was rubbish!"

She told me that halfway through our stop on the mountainside, she had returned to Giovanni's favoured cafe and found him sitting there as happy as Larry with a big steak meal  in front of him and a jug of red wine too. This was clearly his regular recompense for directing  a large bunch of holidaymakers  to that cafe on every trip he led.

As we headed home, Giovanni told us things that he had previously  told us on the way up the coast. It seemed that he had forgotten. I am glad that the passengers did not have a whip round for him because I would have contributed a button, a bottle top and a half-sucked mint. I am sorry to say that that was all he deserved.