I have decided that what distinguishes the Italians from the Irish is that they are always present to the ultimate extent, whereas we seem to have been born with a dismaying tendency to postpone our fullest engagement with reality until we are truly "ready," writes John Waters.
It is a difference infused with pathos and tragedy, embracing thought, speech, hand gestures and dress sense. For them, every day offers a new opportunity for realisation. For us, each day is an occasion of waiting for something more "special".
I have been among them again over the past week and will come away determined, one more time, to dress well every day, to eat better food, to spend the winter learning Italian, and to cling for as long as possible to the spirit of the energy that overpowers me just by being in their presence.
Last Wednesday night we participated in a celebration of Irish poems, music and dance at the Meeting for Friendship Among Peoples, the 28th occasion of this annual event at Rimini on the Adriatic.
The truly tragic part was to see these people loving us more than we love ourselves, to watch 3,000 young Italians, of all ages, rush to dance at the foot of the stage as Dervish from Sligo threatened to bring the roof down. Among the most energetic dancers were the stewards whose job was to stop people dancing.
Onstage the dancers were from an Italian school of Irish dancing, Gens D'Is, established a few years ago by Umberto Crespi, a young Italian so bowled over by a visit to Ireland that he took a course in Irish dancing and then went home to teach as many Italians as he could. To date he has had over 3,000 pupils. Half-an-hour after the end of last Wednesday's event, a hundred young Italians remained at the foot of the stage singing Molly Malone.
The Meeting for Friendship Among Peoples occurs under the banner of Communion and Liberation, the Catholic lay movement founded over 50 years ago by the late Fr Luigi Giussani, perhaps the greatest Christian philosopher of the past century and the possessor of one of the most beautiful minds of our age.
As I wrote here on first encountering the meeting last year, this event is difficult to describe to anyone who has not experienced it and impossible to convey to anyone whose notions of Catholicism are grounded in ideas of moral policing and social control.
Dervish, coming to it for the first time, and having noted the term "Catholic movement", expected an audience of perhaps a hundred pensioners sitting quietly in a room. Instead, they encountered a force of nature to match their music.
One of the key elements that distinguishes Fr Giussani from the broad sweep of Catholic theologians is his insistence that our relationship with God, with the infinite reality, must be defined not by moralism but by an authentic experience of reality, by "something bursting in from the outside". Religion is characterised not by fear or obedience, but by wonder.
If you think you know all there is to know about Christianity, log on to the Amazon website and get yourself a copy of one of Fr Giussani's books, now translated into English.
The Religious Sense would make a good starting point. The latest of his works, just posthumously published in Italian, is called Being Certain of a Few Great Things, the most crucial of the "great things" is that God is an actual presence in the world.
If we believe this, everything changes, including ourselves. If we do not, we deny the "original phenomenon" and so succumb to atrophy.
In my lifetime I have seen Christianity assaulted from two directions - from within by those intent upon misrepresenting it to maintain an earthly dominance - and from without by those who, misunderstanding the meaning of human freedom, seek to quiet the one voice intent upon suggesting something hopeful, even after we have discovered that, as Fr Giussani says, all earthly pleasures end in disgust.
And here, to return to the dichotomy proposed at the outset, we encounter the paradox inherent in the distinctions between us and the Italians. (I generalise, of course, but I hope you are used to that by now.)
They love life because they love themselves. They seem instinctively to understand that perfection is not possible, and so they dress every day in their best clothes and make you feel when they meet you that you have been mistaken for someone more beautiful, more brilliant, more interesting and more important.
We, caught in the unfortunate slipstream of our history, seek perfection in everything, and worst of all in ourselves; but, inevitably failing to find it, are condemned to dissatisfaction with actually reality and a perpetual waiting for we know not what.
They, though collectively at least as disenchanted with Catholicism as we are, have allowed a chink to remain through which the wonder of the infinite can still catch the eye.
It seems obvious that our best hope lies in being more like them.