Amedeo Modigliani, Woman with a Cigarette. Image courtesy of the National Gallery of Art.

During the year I lived in Milan, I learned a few things about Mediterranean mealtimes. Breakfast is bolted on the hop, but lunches are long and dinners drawn-out. Even in the middle of an overbooked day at the office, colleagues would collect up bags and blackberries at midday and march out for a repast done right. And right means your primo pasto, secondo and perhaps a light little something for dessert (some scoops of tiramisu or a creme caramel). The point is there’s ritual, and a regular order to things in Italian eating — and what I was most struck by when I first got there was seeing the cigarette slot into the sequence right after the sweet, with the short sharp shot of espresso ingested to expedite the afternoon’s work.

This sort of smoking is about social bonding through a communal activity, and feeds more than a physical craving per se. Smokers dwindled by a third when the ban was introduced to Italy, but I believe that there, of all places, it’ll take a lot to expunge a habit that’s hatched in to the very pleasure-filled patterns of people’s days. This painting might put across my point. Madame Amédée (Woman with Cigarette) is by Amedeo Modigliani (1884 – 1920) and there’s a sensuous ease here that physicalizes the Italian approach to a tobacco-toke. This portrait, with its marshmallow-softness and liquid line, perfectly packages the influences that Modigliani assembled so seamlessly in his style. In the facial features, color-blocking and modernist treatment of the madame he’s echoing African sculpture, Cézanne and Picasso.