A feature of the Irishman's life in modern Italy is to come across an immediate, all-embracing Italian sympathy for Ireland and the Irish.
Tell Italians you come from Ireland and the reaction ranges from enthusiasm for the holiday that their daughter had in Dublin last summer to expressions of admiration for everything Irish - from lush green countryside and James Joyce to U2 and the Celtic Tiger.
There is a line of Italian thought which wishes to greet the Irish as some sort of long-lost soul brother, a view based on the familiar old notion that the Irish are "the Latins of Northern Europe", far removed from cold Anglo-Saxon ways and much closer to warm-blooded Mediterranean man.
While one might be entitled to serious reservations about this theory, there is no getting away from the genuine expression of empathy it represents.
Last Saturday, that sense of good will found expression in Alatri, a Lazio town of 24,000 inhabitants about 120 km south-east of Rome and close to the well-known spa town of Fiuggi. Alatri chose to honour the memory of two of the victims of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland when the Paolo Borsellino Memorial Association presented a £1,000 prize to both Ethel Allen and Anne Trainor, mothers of Philip Allen and Damien Trainor, the Protestant and Catholic friends killed by loyalist gunmen as they enjoyed a glass of orange juice at the Railway Bar in Poyntzpass, Co Armagh, in March last year.
Paolo Borsellino, of course, was the Sicilian magistrate who, along with Giovanni Falcone, spearheaded the Italian state's fight against Cosa Nostra in the 1970s and 1980s. Both men knew only too well that their work was undermined both from within, by elements in the judiciary and police force in the pay of Cosa Nostra, and from without, by politicians reliant on the Mafia for votes and funds.
Legend has it that when Borsellino and Falcone had something important to tell each other, they would meet in the lift in the Palazzo di Giustizia in Palermo, so much did they feel themselves to be under siege.
Both men were blown up by the Mafia in the summer of 1992, Falcone in a car bomb explosion in May while on his way from Palermo airport to the city and Borsellino when he rang the doorbell at his mother's apartment in Palermo on a Sunday afternoon in July.
At first glance, there would appear to be no connection between Paolo Borsellino and the killings of Philip Allen and Damien Trainor.
I would suggest that there is one obvious link.
The anger of the people of Palermo, so palpable on the day of Paolo Borsellino's funeral, was and is not dissimilar to the anger of those Irishmen and women appalled by sectarian killings. The Paolo Borsellino Memorial Association states, as one of its aims, the need to recall the memory of people who, like the late Sicilian magistrate, "sacrificed themselves for the greater good of civilised society".
Damien Trainor and Philip Allen were not public figures but it is at least arguable that, without knowing it, they were sacrificed for the "greater good of civilised society". That is certainly the view of Francesco Gabrielli, an Alatri chemist and guiding light of the small, voluntarily run, 50-member strong Paolo Borsellino Association.
Dr Gabrielli has a special link with Paolo Borsellino since his Sicilian wife grew up with Borsellino's sister, Rita, while his daughter Francesca studied medicine in Palermo with Lucia Borsellino, daughter of the magistrate. He converted his grief and anger at Borsellino's death into something positive, into the creation of the association, in February 1993.
Supported by the community of Alatri and by its mayor, Patrizio Cittadini, he organises an annual prize in memory of the magistrate, a prize that in the past has gone to Mexican Bishop Samuel Ruiz as well as to the Sarajevo newspaper Oslobodjenje.
Last Saturday night, Dr Gabrielli and his friends from Alatri made the Allen and Trainor families more than welcome, starting off the evening with a performance of Johan Pachelbel's famous Canone by a small chamber orchestra and ending it, in time-honoured fashion, with a splendid spread of local pasta dishes and wine.
More important than the prizes and the hospitality, however, was the expression of solidarity, even at a distance of 2,500 km. Bravi e complimenti.