Writing of the fight that she and her family were engaged in when she was a child, she compared it with the recent reaction of public officials to the ‘occupation’ of the Duomo square in Florence when Somali Muslims in Florence erected tents around the cathedral. The camp lasted for three months and was a major controversy in Florence at the time. In her polemic Fallaci told of how she had contacted every public official in Florence and then in Italy demanding to know why they could not clear away this site in the centre of the city, only to be greeted on each occasion with professions of incapability. She relates that eventually she phoned a local policeman and told him that if he didn’t clear the tents away she would burn them down herself and he would then have to arrest her and incarcerate her in her own city.

Such emasculated Italians, Europeans and Westerners in general were as much the target of Fallaci’s rage as Muslims. As were all those who would draw comparisons or equality between the world of the West and the world of Islam. While acknowledging the failings and sins of the West, Fallaci insisted ‘I want to defend my culture, not theirs, and I inform you that I like Dante Alighieri and Shakespeare and Goethe and Verlaine and Walt Whitman and Leopardi much more than Omar Khayyam.’20 She had, she claimed, as much veneration for any work of art as any Muslim professed to have for Mecca.21 The cultural pride and defiance of Fallaci perhaps stood out because it was so rare in that period.

Yet Fallaci’s fiery style undoubtedly sometimes tipped over into something else. In relating the desecration by Somali Muslims in the Duomo square she obsessed about their bodily functions, about the excrement and especially the trails of urine from the camp: ‘the yellow streaks of urine that profaned the millenary marbles of the Baptistery as well as its golden doors. (Good Heavens! They really take long shots, these sons of Allah!)’.22 Though it was when discussing the reproductive habits of the new Muslims of Italy that Fallaci walked into trouble.