The year is 1537 and it is July but the Venetian poet and satirist Pietro Aretino is thinking about the winter. Not for him the summer heat. “I am happier when I see the snow falling from the sky than when I feel myself burnt by those soft summer breezes,” he writes to his doctor friend Agostino Ricchi (see Aretino: Selected Letters, translated by George Bull for Penguin Classics 1976).

He adds: “Certainly winter seems to me like an abbot who swans along in comfortable ease, enjoying the delights of eating, sleeping and doing you know what with enormous gusto. And then summer comes like a rich, noble harlot who throws herself down, bathed in sweat and does nothing but drink and drink.

“Yet all the cool wines and flowery rooms, with as many fans and soft dews as June and July can imagine, are not worth a morsel of the bread and oil eaten around the fire in December and January as one gulps down a cup or two of new wine and, while the spit turns, tears off a piece of roast pork without worrying about one’s thieving mouth and fingers being cooked themselves.”

Aretino follows this with a little rhapsody about a warm bed and mistress’s embrace, and a testy denunciation of heat, bugs and flies during the season of cherries, figs, peaches and grapes

“Whereas, in winter, four dry logs have all the elements needed to sustain good talk for four or five hours, with a bowl of chestnuts on the fire and a bottle of wine between one’s legs. So we love the winter as the true springtime of great minds.”