Italy, as every schoolchild knows, is a beautiful land of green and golden hills in which wheat wafts plentifully in the fields, and a day without olives is a day without sunshine. Tuscany, however, is a hateful, sagebrushy kind of place in which a day without a poke in the eye, administered by a squat Tuscan's finger, brings only the certain knowledge that tomorrow they'll stick their thumb is there as well.

Italians divide into three categories: beautiful men with silk shirts and cigarette holders, beautiful women with hourglass figures and glittering, olive-black eyes, and sturdy, trunk-legged matriarchs clutching armfuls of tagliatelle. Tuscans have only one category: short, mean-spirited, wine-drunk motherfucker. Both male and female Tuscans wear greasy, creaking leather breeches and grubby jerkins into which they stuff rancid butter, hunks of old sausage and unspeakable clots of blood and hair to sustain them during long arguments with their friends and family. They have heavy stubble, thick necks and enormously powerful arms and hands, which they use to enforce their vulgar will on whoever is unfortunate enough to get in their way.

In times past, Italians rode elegant horses with gleaming flanks and flaring nostrils. In recent years they have swapped their horses for enormous, shining motorcars which they polish daily with their luxuriant moustaches. But Tuscans ride neither horses nor cars. They ride pigs. And not nice friendly pink porkers either, but great bristly-backed hogs with flaking skin, horrid squinting eyes and truly evil tempers. These pigs live on a diet of eggshells and cats, and will take a chunk out of a child's leg if they can get close enough. The pig's violent hatred for his Tuscan is only matched by the Tuscan's violent hatred for his pig. This mutual disdain forms a powerful bond, and Tuscan and pig are seldom parted, eating, sleeping and fighting together. If you're ever unfortunate enough to witness two married Tuscans copulating, you will undoubtedly also be witness to the synchronised fucking of a pair of beastly hogs, right there in the same bed. It's an awful sight.

Italians are noted for their love of music, from the hushed excitement of the opera to the midnight serenade, in which a doe-eyed, slender-limbed youth will sing enchanting arias as his beloved combs her raven hair in the light of the silver moon. Tuscans also have a form of serenade, but this involves drunkenly and furiously howling, swaggering round in their piss-soaked breeches, and offering to fight their beloved's male relatives from the meanest, thorniest, horniest old granddad down to the greasiest little baby of the clan. Generally it's impossible to distinguish the sound of a Tuscan singing from the groans and gurgles of a traditional fist-and-knuckle street fight.

While Italians play guitars with great skill, Tuscans' fingers are generally too thick to master the subtle fret-work of their neighbours. Instead they play bagpipes incessantly, delighting in producing the most dischordant, screeching cacophony possible, accompanied on important occasions by slapping their fat hands against their bellies.

When Tuscans go on holiday to other parts of Italy, they wander around the parks and piazzas blinking dimwittedly in the sunlight, mashed-up fistfuls of spaghetti trailing from their hands. They stuff their ears with mozzarella to block out the chirping of birds, the noise of cappuccino machines, and the arias sung by doe-eyed youths. They don't like the food much and they miss their pigs, which are banned under general Italian law for reasons of hygiene, aesthetics and public decency. They become gloomy and despondent, leading Italians and foreigners to conclude Tuscans to be a thoughtful and poetic people, brooding melancholically on matters like beauty and art.

But don't let this fool you. It doesn't last long. As soon as they're back over the border - snorting and snotting excitedly through the mouldering alleyways they call home - having thumbed the mozzarella from their ears and trampled the souvenirs they bought, having joyously kicked and headbutted their pigs and received equally joyous bites in their thighs and buttocks in return, they'll return immediately to their swaggering, foul-mouthed, spiteful, obnoxious and antagonistic ways. The bagpipes will howl, the babies will curse, the drunks will defecate uncontrollably, and all the animals apart from the pigs will creep shyly away to Italy, which, as every schoolchild knows, is a beautiful land of green and golden hills in which wheat wafts plentifully in the fields, and a day without olives is a day without sunshine.