The city center, sloping downhill toward the bay, Pike Place Market, the lakefront in Bellevue, the ups and downs of Madison Avenue, the shops and restaurants of Capitol Hill: everything brightly lit up. The spectacle is so captivating that even Microsoft, a very important resident, appears romantic for a moment (the feeling passes). In order to resist the euphoria, and to celebrate a day without rails, we visit two antithetical places: Amazon and Elliott Bay Book Company. They have books in common, but that’s as far as it goes.
At the latter, I meet up with Casey and Rick, whom I first got to know on the publication of my previous books. Both Amazon and Elliott Bay Book Company moved their operations two years earlier, revitalizing—each in its own way—an entire neighborhood. Amazon left the PacMed building, its old redbrick headquarters on Beacon Hill, and moved to South Lake Union. Elliott Bay moved from Pioneer Square, near the bay, to Capitol Hill, on the other side of Interstate 5.
You know about Amazon (because you probably buy things from Amazon): it not only dominates the publishing marketplace; it has invented a new paradigm. You may not know Elliott Bay Book Company, but it was—and remains—the most welcoming bookstore on the West Coast. The bookstore complains that it is considered, by some, to be nothing more than a display window: people come in, they find a book they want, they go home, and they order it from Amazon at a discount. Amazon points out that all industrial revolutions cause disruptions. “After all,” the company explains, “we offer our customers a service: it’s up to them to decide whether they want it.”
I know perfectly well that the matter isn’t as simple as that, that it involves issues of competition, copyright, public utility. But on such a beautiful day, let a man who buys lots of books and has written a few have his dreams. Let me say that Amazon is unbeatable when it comes to array of choice and speed of delivery. But a bookstore is unrivaled as a place of social interaction, an opportunity to meet and debate (with booksellers, authors, and other readers). It would be sad to be left alone, with one’s book simply delivered to one’s door. And it would be absurd to give up the speed, comfort, and convenience of that delivery.
On this day without trains, in the space of a mile and a half, I see a mini Statue of Liberty, a tyrannosaurus under glass, the golden sands of Hawaii, a medieval tower, and two benches side by side: blue for Democrats, red for Republicans.
This is not a psychedelic delirium, and we’re not in Florida or Las Vegas, where architectural excess is predictable and encouraged. We’re on Lake Washington, the urban lake behind Seattle, home to individuals who have become rich on (our) computers: Bill Gates (Microsoft), Paul Allen (his ex-partner), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), and many others.
The houses run down to the water, the lawns gleam, and today the weather is on our side. You might even see human beings lying on the grass without a windbreaker. In the Medina neighborhood, Bezos’s mansion is half-concealed amidst the greenery; Bill Gates’s little beach looks soft (microsoft?). I don’t know who owns the tyrannosaurus, but it’s clearly visible inside a glass structure. They tell me that it’s set on a platform and that it rears over the indoor pool. Of course it does: who of us hasn’t dreamed of swimming under the benevolent gaze of a carnivorous biped that belongs to the saurischian order?
The distance between the pluto-paleontologist of Seattle and the residents of Malta, Montana, is considerable; however, they’re still all Americans, and it’s possible to find points of contact. For instance, houses, more than clothing or cars, are social indicators, understood and accepted by one and all. The question “Where do you live?” is rarely a matter of innocent curiosity. The answer helps to classify a person. Let us remain in Seattle, or actually Lake Washington: the eastern shore is more desirable than the western one. Over here live the rich, over there the merely well-to-do. Everyone else just goes to the lake on weekends.
Living on a certain street, in the United States, can be a great aid in one’s financial and social climbing, and that kind of climbing remains the most widely practiced sport in the country. An American house is a fortress without gates; sometimes, an Italian house is a gate without fortress. The real estate bubble that popped in the USA between 2007 and 2009—triggering financial problems around the world—was caused by the spasmodic desire to buy more house than people could afford.
When I wrote Ciao, America!: An Italian Discovers the U.S., I chose to tell the story of a house, our house in Washington, DC. A house, if you know how to approach it, is the mouth of a tunnel that leads into the American mind. A mind that is no stranger or more complicated than an Italian mind—but it is different.
Certainly, it’s not easy to understand why a sane man would build a lake house and stick a tyrannosaurus inside it. Wouldn’t a triceratops have been enough? It’s shorter, and it goes better with the surroundings.
A Polish Blogger Races Toward the Finish Line
The Coast Starlight is almost an elegant train; we’re not used to such a thing. From Seattle (King Street Station) it runs south toward Los Angeles and—Amtrak assures us—you can see dolphins from your window. We say so long to Seattle in its customary attire, which we had not yet had a chance to admire: rain and fog, in open defiance of summer.
The train cars date from 1985: aging, but well preserved. There’s even a car from 1957, which houses a little movie theater with insanely aggressive air-conditioning (maybe they use it as a freezer for poultry when there’s a shortage of passengers). There is a geriatric first class, where the average age is the same as that of the Italian ruling class. We are seated, as usual, in coach. In the seat behind us is Jakub Górski, a Polish blogger who first boarded a train in New York, where he’s returning by way of Seattle, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Atlanta, and Washington, DC. Thirteen thousand kilometers (a little over eight thousand miles) in thirteen days, with a super-affordable ticket he bought in London. Jakub doesn’t even get a sleeperette: he reclines his seat back and falls asleep under a camo blanket, dreaming of Polish trains. To hear him tell it, they’re not much different.
The final day of a long trip is strange, full of bittersweet happiness. Karl, armed with his little video camera, pursues his last few victims; Gianni shoots footage of a young woman’s tattoos; Andrea writes; Alberto thinks about Bruce Springsteen and Santa Monica, where he’ll return tomorrow. The conductor broadcasts disjointed phrases over the loudspeaker: “In the USA, lollipops are illegal! And it’s against the rules to claim your parents are rich if they aren’t!” Then he threatens to confiscate all cell phones. Last of all, he reminds us that “smoking aboard trains is a federal offense and those found guilty will be deported to a secret prison in Eastern Europe!” The Polish blogger Jakub listens without turning a hair.
We reach our destination safe and sound. At 1:30 p.m., right on time, we pull into Union Station in Portland, Oregon. We left Portland, Maine, eighteen days ago. Rain here, rain there, sunshine in between. Karl still wants to interview someone. But the passengers are stepping down off the Coast Starlight and slipping away into the rain, becoming memories; and we do the same.
6
From Trieste to Trapani: Italy in Second Class
The cafés and restaurants of train stations boast a long tradition of charm, melancholy, or squalor. . . .
They are particle accelerators, places of experimentation in emotional physics, where fission is taken to its logical extreme.
VALERIO MAGRELLI, LA VICEVITA
Trieste–Mantua
There are two teenagers at the Trieste train station, the boy dressed as a cowboy, the girl as a squaw. They are lovely and absurd on this cold, dark winter morning. They’re buying tickets to Venice. It’s Fat Tuesday, and Alice and Nicola, thirty-five years of age between them, want their piece of carnival.
Trieste constitutes an ideal point of departure for my journey across the country. It is proudly Italian (we fought World War I to get it back from Austria), but it also feels Slavic (Slo
venia is a few miles away). It looks German (it used to be the main harbor of the Austro-Hungarian Empire). It is Christian and it is Jewish. It faces the blue Adriatic Sea, with the green Carso mountains at the back. It’s the North of the South, the South of the North, the East of the West, and the West of the East.
Great minds met here—Italo Svevo took English lessons from James Joyce, who made sure he would publish his masterpiece Zeno’s Conscience (La coscienza di Zeno) in Paris, after local publishers turned it down. Trieste is brilliant, eccentric, and resilient, and it does nothing the way you’d expect.
I’m starting my journey here, in Italy’s northeastern corner, and ending it in Trapani, Sicily—the farthest in Italy you can get from here. From quasi-Germany to near-Africa. The whole way by train, in second-class seats. When I tell my fellow passengers, they shoot me a glance that contains a mixture of surprise, pity, and envy. Italy is a boot-shaped mystery, and everybody, at least once in his or her lifetime, has thought about traveling the whole length of the country, to investigate.
Why am I doing this? Because I realized that I have never done it before. I’ve crossed Europe, America, Siberia, and Australia by train, not my own country. I’ve been almost everywhere in Italy, but there was no pattern. An assignment, a vacation, a short trip, a wedding, a visit to a friend or a relative—I’ve seen hundreds of individual places. But I never took the time to cross my own country. So I decided to do it, slowly, taking my time, watching the ever-changing land of Italy. I’ll forget I’m a professional journalist, this time. Not an in-depth investigation, just a little taste of what I’ve been missing.
“I travelled among unknown men,” wrote William Wordsworth. He came across them “in lands beyond the sea”; I’m going to meet them on a train in my own country, which—believe me—can be just as mysterious.
What is Italy? Is it an inferno, as some suspect, or a demon-speckled paradise? I’d say it was a pretty-looking purgatory, full of contented, tormented souls. The train is the perfect place to meet with them, listen to them, talk to them, understand what makes them tick. I’ll be traveling before an election, which will contribute some tension to the travelers’ mood. But, in Italy, politics is only background noise. We’ve seen so much for too long—rulers from Rome, from Greece, from Africa, from Germany and America; imperious priests and pious emperors; departing crusaders and incoming invaders; politicians of every shape and kind, from the Borgias to Berlusconi—to be overwhelmed by politics and politicians. At times they can be annoying, of course. But you get used to them, and you go on with your life.
Regional Express no. 2210 rolls quietly westward. Nicola and Alice—the cowboy and the squaw—exchange a kiss as we pass the Castle of Miramare, beautiful and spooky, built for Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian of Austria. The feathers in her headdress, backlit by the pale blue of the sea, are spectacularly out of place.
It’s the last day of carnival. There is a sensation that something is coming to an end. In Venice, at the Santa Lucia station—snow and salt on the ground, water the color of steel—not even the masked partyers look all that cheerful. The performance of fun, but nothing more. A gust of young women in eighteenth-century garb blows by, greeting us as they pass. Students at the Academy of Fine Arts of Venice offer to face-paint passersby for five euros apiece. “So you see what I studied for?” says Michela, who comes from Brescia.
Young people in costume walk seriously past, and a group of undersized Asians pushes oversized suitcases through the piles of snow. It’s damp and cold. I go back into Santa Lucia railway station. We pull out again. Eleven days to go, at my chosen slow pace. Sicily is more than a thousand miles away.
Mantua–Genoa
Mantua is situated in a bay in the sea of grass of Lombardy. The railway station is a frozen anchorage, and it’s not uncommon to have to spend more time there than scheduled. Here Trenord (the northern network) meets Trenitalia (the national network), and the results are occasionally bizarre. Indeed, we miss the regional train for Cremona—we don’t even see it pull out; Track 5 is hidden somewhere. Stefano Scansani, a local journalist and a friend, jokes about the rail-replacement bus service: the contract, he says, was assigned in a competition to a company from Puglia, five hundred miles from here. None of the drivers are familiar with the area, and when the fog is especially thick, they ask the passengers for directions. But all too often the passengers aren’t even Italian; they’re guest workers from Africa, and they haven’t a clue either.
Some Italians are on this train, though. They inform me that yesterday the factory workers at the Burgo paper mill, slated to be shut down soon, evicted the HR director, carrying his desk and office furniture out into the snow. The local farmers’ bank has problems; the chemical industry is struggling; the owners of the Mantua soccer team, Mantova FC, want to sell. The Camera degli Sposi (Wedding Room) in the Ducal Palace, one of the leading local tourist attractions, has been closed since the earthquake of 2012. True, Mantua hosts Festivaletteratura, the best literary festival in Europe. But it’s not enough to uplift the residents’ mood.
The train for Modena leaving at 11:31 a.m. is slow, clean, and painted with nursery school hues (lemon yellow, sky blue, pea green). Hares leap happily across snowbound fields. Between Mantua and Modena most of the passengers are recent immigrants. A few university students board at stations with intensely literary names and sprawl in their seats, earbuds in their ears and books in their arms. We pull into Modena fifteen minutes behind schedule, and I miss our connection. Two trains missed in half a day: not bad.
I board the 1:41 p.m. heading for Piacenza. The city, known across Italy for its superb coppa ham, offers a chilly welcome: this is a matter not of hospitality, but of temperature. My fellow passengers are actually nice and quite happy to talk. This is not unusual. Italy’s trains are places of group confession and collective absolution, which is ideal for a Catholic country. Foreigners should listen to what people are saying. If they don’t speak Italian, they can watch how they gesture. It’s performance art. Do you think that confessionals and stages are incompatible? In other countries, they might be, but not here. The conversations are public exhibitions, with their own rituals and virtuoso touches.
Look at those three. They could be colleagues returning from a business meeting. They’re not talking; they’re proclaiming. They’re not communicating; they’re issuing mini-communiqués, drafted by the mini media offices each of them has in his or her head. As you can hear, they’re arguing. And revealing some quite amazing details. They tackle one topic after another, piling arguments—and voices—on top of one another. Actually, the train is the precursor of the talk show. It offers a set, a backdrop, personalities, and various ways to make your exit.
I leave Piacenza aboard the regional train no. 20388 at 3:15 p.m., heading west to Voghera: subtropical temperature inside the train, snow as far as the eye can see outside. Voghera or Volgograd? one is tempted to ask. The train compartment conversation—the kind that leads people to confide—is absent; the compartment-less open space of a local train car tends to induce short questions and monosyllabic responses—you know everybody can hear you. In Voghera, while waiting for our train, two solidly built women in their early forties tell us they’re from Liguria and every day they spend more than two hours commuting by train. Together, we board the Intercity no. 673, which arrives in Genoa twenty minutes late. Yesterday morning we were in Trieste; just two days later we’ve reached another sea. Haven’t heard much about mood.
Genoa–Livorno
The dark-haired young woman is called Esmeralda and she looks suspiciously at my notebook. After a while she lets her hair down and starts to talk. She was a contestant on Uomini e Donne, a reality show on Italian television. She did it for fun, she tells me. She’s now dating another contestant. She’s going to see him in Rome for Valentine’s Day. Signorina Esmeralda’s political program is fairly simple: “Send all of them out to work in the fields. Tha
t way they will get an understanding of the value of hard work!” A buzz of approval in the compartment on the Intercity no. 511 Turin–Salerno, which has just pulled out of Genoa.
Intercity no. 511 is an age-old train of domestic migration, and it preserves all the character of its tradition. A fascinating Italian blender, capable of bringing together geography, income, education, and history. The drinks cart dodges around suitcases, dogs, and children. It isn’t the modern drinks cart of the high-speed train from Milan to Rome and Naples. It’s the epitome of an old-fashioned railway drinks cart, pushed by an attendant with a cap and a certain difficulty when it comes to making change. The announcement comes not from a loudspeaker but from a pair of weary lips that have uttered the words too many times: “Ice-cold Coca-Cola! Beer! Sandwiches, potato chips, espresso!” I eye the good old TUC crackers in their yellow packaging: a reassuring presence. The world changes, but TUC doesn’t.
In Liguria I ask for opinions about the upcoming election and a local boy, Beppe Grillo, the founder of the populist Five Star Movement. And opinions are forthcoming. I’ll confess: I was expecting greater enthusiasm. The caustic mistrust intrinsic to the Ligurian character clearly doesn’t spare even its famous sons.
Anna Maria thinks the Five Star Movement will win, but she has no intention of contributing to it with her own vote. Nor will Mr. Grillo get the vote of Stefano, a student majoring in economics: he doesn’t like the fact that Grillo refuses to participate in televised debates. Franco, having run through a litany of complaints about the bathrooms aboard this train, opines that in Genoa, the more traditional parties aren’t doing all that badly. Elio and Angela, an argumentative couple, don’t understand why Beppe Grillo doesn’t run for office himself, but instead only sends the others on ahead. To summarize: polls say the Five Star Movement is popular in Liguria, but not aboard the Intercity no. 511.
Off the Rails Page 14