Tomorrow, ‘fish Friday’, as the UK ‘s supermarkets proudly proclaim, there will be another kind of fishing taking place in Florence. Indeed, there will be another instance in the space of less than a week when protestant meets Catholic.

I have recently described the wondrous appearance of perhaps the finest of Anglican choirs at the throne of Saint Peter’s Rome. A less miraculous apparition will take place this Friday in the glorious half gothic, half Alberti renaissance church of Santa Maria Novella, whose apse frescoes, among others by Giotto, greets the traveller when stepping out of the aptly named SMN station of Florence.

This apparition will, in fact, be that of the British prime minister who will, undoubtedly be misspelt ‘Teresa’ in the Italian press. She will be part of a triumvirate including Hammond, the painting of the martyrdom of whose original namesake is among the rich art treasures enshrined in this noblest of Dominican monasteries.

Now will the spirits of the fresco in the church’s chapter house of the ‘Domenici cani’, the ‘dogs of the Dominicans’ tear to pieces the present incarnation of Santa Teresa, whose intensely erotic statue by Bernini I saw earlier this week in Rome, or will she weave them into a political extasy by her pronouncements?

Fishing for the souls of a European state which, among so many other things kicked off the renaissance and modern banking (perhaps the two depended on each other?) will be difficult, especially as Florence is still owed sums of money, now running into billions of Euros with accrued compound interest, which it foolishly lent the British state during the fifteenth century.

Reading the headline of the now converted ‘Evening Standard’ (not to Catholicism I hasten to add but to a more pro-European stance) I read ‘Brexit Britain in the slow lane’.

My general feel on this whole farce, which is even more ridiculous and time and money wasting than the Forest Hill atmospheric railway of the nineteenth century, is that the only people (at least in London) who still believe in Brexshit are those who are intellectually challenged, illiterate or just plain daft.

Whatever happens in the wonderful ambience of Santa Maria Novella is anybody’s guess. I, as a hopeless idealist, still believe in a  miracle. Either a fresco will be commissioned on the subject of the conversion of Theresa (this time spelled correctly) or more groats or ‘fiorini’ (florins, as named after the city of the Lily) will be added to the huge debt Britain owes Europe and especially Italy, whose economic growth now is leaving the inhabitants of islands, first civilized by another triumvirate, this time from the capitoline hill, well on the way to economic misery and, maybe, even mayhem…