"Nobody is thinking about firing cannon at a ship full of people," Mr. Berlusconi told a television interviewer on Wednesday, "but something has to be done".
Set on a narrow street in the old town, it is full of cannons, compasses, ship figureheads and other nautical memorabilia.
Then, with Jay driving the Expedition, we were off to Virginia Beach Boulevard, to this car shop Lex frequents, where we stared like chin-stroking art-gallery types at some really beautiful old "box Chevys" — square-bodied '70s Caprices, painstakingly pimped, their trunks full of bass-cannon stereo equipment, their paint jobs rain-beaded like a Photoshop texture-tool demo.
He was "stunned by the sight of the open breech of a.75 cannon in full sunlight, confronted with the play of light on white metal".
All those ancient forts, once bristling with cannons manned by sharp-eyed gunners, are now full of tourists scampering around their ramparts and posing for pictures on the cannons.
Computer-generated images of an hour-long battle at sea are full of crashing waves and flaming cannon fire.
I suspect it'll be out of stock indefinitely unless Nike has somehow managed to make an affordable T-shirt cannon that doesn't rely on a giant backpack full of compressed air.
As, door by door, each new vista is revealed, all merge into one disturbing scene: an armoury full of violent male toys including sword and cannon, a garden of blood-red carnations springing from ashes, a shadowy lake of tears.
We're used to the idea that universities are rampantly radical institutions, full of unwashed students in desperate need of a water cannon and lecturers like me who only egg them on.
