In his remarkable account of life as a prisoner of war on the run in Italy of 1943, Love and War in the Apennines, Eric Newby recalled how difficult it was for absconding POWs to get by unnoticed as they tried to pass themselves off as Italians.
No matter how hard they might try with their civilian "disguises", there was always some aspect of their get-up that did not fool the critical Italian eye.
The man sitting opposite on the train would notice something wrong with the colour of the laces in the POW's shoes. The woman at the ticket barrier would notice a crude piece of sewing on the collar of the POW camp "tailored" overcoat. Worse still, carabinieri and fascist officials would spot socks, shoes, ties and shirts that no Italian would ever wear with those particular trousers, jackets or coats.
This is about Italian taste, Italian sense of style and, also, Italian powers of observation. Italians, by and large, notice - everything. Perhaps it has something to do with being a Mediterranean people, accustomed to living out a street culture where the heat means that the best sport going is simply watching people strut their stuff up and down the sidewalk.
Maybe that visual awareness has also something to do with the ancestry of a race that has left posterity a handsome booty, from the Etruscan vase through the Roman amphitheatre and on to any number of medieval and Renaissance masterpieces.
The "Italian Eye" came to mind on Monday, listening to reports of the death in Afghanistan of Corriere Della Sera correspondent, Maria Grazia Cutuli, killed along with three colleagues and an interpreter in an apparent ambush near Kabul.
The fact is that, often over the years, one has had good reason to admire the work of Italian colleagues, especially those reporting from sometimes dangerous foreign places. The eye for detail, the feel for local nuance, the diplomatic skills necessary for the foreign outsider, even the linguistic skills, sometimes seem to come more easily to Mediterraneans than to northern Europeans.
Ms Cutuli (39) seems to fit in with this honourable tradition.
A reporter whose considered herself "in love with Africa" and whose idea of a "holiday" was a trip to Bosnia, Rwanda, Sudan, Sierra Leone or Cambodia to report on the latest developments, she was yesterday described by one colleague, Renzo Cianfanelli, as "having effectively married the profession she loved".
Her death has made the war in Afghanistan suddenly seem that much closer to Italy and Italians, and that just two days after a four-vessel Italian fleet manned by 1,400 sailors set off from Taranto for eventual participation in "Operation Enduring Freedom".
As the Italian media focuses on her death, fragments of her writings and broadcasts have attracted much attention.
A common humanitarian thread runs through work that includes frontline articles on child slavery in Benin, Mafia-run boat people trafficking out of Turkey, the intifada in Palestine, the Buddhist temples blown up earlier this year by the Taliban in Bamiyan, the Rwandan war crimes trials and more besides.
Born in Catania, Sicily, Ms Cutuli followed a trail familiar to many of her fellow islanders when she moved north to Milan to further her career in the early 1980s.
When journalism became dull, she continued her humanitarian bent by doing voluntary work with the UN High Commission for Refugees in Rwanda in 1994.
Only on Monday of this week, along with her colleague and friend, Julio Fuentes of the Spanish daily El Mundo, she had published a scoop revealing their joint discovery of 20 vials of nerve gas in an abandoned hideaway in the hills above Jalalabad, apparently used by Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network.
Corriere Della Sera claimed the discovery lent credence to the belief that al-Qaeda was (or is) preparing for chemical warfare.
Whether that claim is true or not, what is certain is that Ms Cutuli, Mr Fuentes (who was killed along with her on Monday) and the other five reporters killed in Afghanistan in recent weeks all deserve our respect, gratitude and admiration.