Italian Ways

by Tim Parks

  IT WAS IN THIS magnificent concourse, some years ago, that I had my bag stolen. Needing to make a phone call, in pre-mobile days, I stopped at a payphone and put my bag down at my feet. The phones are criminally riveted to the brown marble coping. It’s sheer vandalism. I dialled, I listened. Someone was running by. I turned my head to see a young man charging off with a bag, quite a heavy bag to judge by the way it was banging against his leg, the way his body twisted as he ran. ‘Pronto?’ a voice enquired. ‘Rita?’ Already the figure was lost in the crowd by the newspaper kiosk, at which point I realised that that bag was mine. Damn! My old black bag!

  The following morning, convinced that no one would have wanted to go far with my students’ theses, a set of proofs, three volumes of Leopardi’s Zibaldone and a change of underwear, I returned to Milan early to see if, abandoned perhaps, the bag might have been handed in as lost property.

  While the lower hall of the station is an austere cathedral space across which a stream of travellers constantly flows from metro to escalators, the upper concourse is an interminable and confused milling among shops and bars and platforms as people wait for trains to appear, or try to find a machine that’s working to stamp their tickets, or even a place to lie down and sleep. There’s a constant attrition between the commuters who know how to use the station and move with brutal directness between platform and escalators, and the tourists heaving their preposterous bags this way and that in sleepy bewilderment. I couldn’t find a Lost Property Office.

  Eventually I knocked on the window of a glass cubicle with a policeman behind. Much of Milano Centrale is cluttered with cubicles and kiosks and nondescript cabins that seem to have been produced by a later and lesser civilisation than the one that built the station, as if for the past thirty years we had merely been camping in the remnants of an older, nobler time. But that’s true of much of Italy.

  Two policemen were smoking, watching a small grey screen. They allowed me to open the door without their going for their guns.

  ‘Assuming someone found a discarded bag,’ I asked, ‘where would he take it?’

  ‘A bag?’

  ‘My bag was stolen.’

  They were not so much impolite as uninterested. ‘Why would anyone pick up a discarded bag?’

  ‘They might feel some sympathy for the person who had lost it,’ I suggested.

  It was an interesting idea.

  ‘I suppose they might bring it here,’ one of the two eventually said. They were southern boys with strong necks and sleek, hard, seal-like heads. They had a sort of animal arrogance in being young and strong, and above all native. They had spotted my accent.

  And has anyone?

  They looked idly about them. The cabin was a tiny space resting against one of the station’s great stone pillars between shops and platforms. There were ashtrays, newspapers and bits of old-fashioned electronics.

  ‘Doesn’t look like it.’

  I have learned to wait in these kinds of conversations, not to seem impatient, just stand and wait. Eventually one of them said:

  ‘Someone might have taken it to Left Luggage.’

  ‘Left Luggage? But why would they do that? Isn’t there a Lost Property Office?’

  The Italian expression is oggetti smarriti. Objects mislaid. But smarrito can also mean puzzled, bewildered.

  Again I had to wait. It’s this quiet refusal to go away that seems to do the trick with Italian officials. Insistence breeds opposition, and friendliness, contempt; only a dogged patience allows them to do their duty without feeling put upon.

  ‘Naturalmente,’ one of them told me, as if this were quite a different subject. I should have asked at once. ‘Platform three, at the end on the left. It’s the entrance that says Railway Personnel Only, up the stairs, second floor.

  I set off. Platform three is the last platform to the left as you emerge at the top of the stairs at platform level, platforms one and two being almost outside the station proper. Along the side of the platform are a row of tall, elegant stone facades, though you’re still well inside the great curved glass roof that shelters trains and passengers. Railway Personnel Only, I reflected; how would anyone ever know to take a lost bag to a place that says Railway Personnel Only?

  On the ground floor there was some kind of common room for the station staff. The stone floor, the old glass-and-wood fittings seemed not to have been altered since the station was inaugurated in 1931. But here and there, there were wires tacked and taped to the walls and incongruous light switches, even a flame-red fire extinguisher.

  I climbed the stairs. It was the sort of stone stairway you expect to find in an old library or town hall. The plaster on the walls was turning to powder. Sure enough, on the second floor, one of four old wooden doors, all much in need of varnish, bore the legend OGGETTI SMARRITI, and a detailed account of opening hours, different, it seemed for every day of the week. When knocking brought no answer, I pushed the door.

  A big gloomy space was piled with bags, boxes, suitcases, parcels, umbrellas. There were a few shelves but no apparent order. Some of the bags seemed to have been left where they had been dropped. It was the sort of place horror-film directors dream of, or playwrights of the absurd, a place of the soul, in limbo.

  I looked around, eyes adjusting to the low light. The room was very quiet, an effect that seemed to be intensified by the distant metallic announcements of departing and arriving trains. ‘C’è nessuno?’ I called. ‘C’è nessuno?’

  After a few moments there was a rustling noise. A man emerged from a grey door just visible over piles of old luggage. He found his way through to me, a man in his late fifties perhaps, craggy, in dungarees, defensive.

  ‘I lost my bag.’

  ‘What kind?’

  I described it.

  ‘There are hundreds of bags like that.’ He gestured to the quiet piles. Judging by the dust, many of them had been there for some time. ‘People lose all kinds of things,’ he said. ‘You wouldn’t believe it.’

  ‘My bag was stolen,’ I told him.

  ‘Well, it won’t be here, then,’ he said. He laughed: ‘A thief doesn’t bring a bag to lost property.’

  ‘I thought, if the thief dumped it, someone might have handed it in.’

  He said nothing.

  ‘Yesterday,’ I offered.

  ‘No black bags handed in today,’ he said.

  I waited.

  ‘Or yesterday. A bit soon perhaps. Try again.’

  It wasn’t an invitation.

  Retreating, it occurred to me that I should have asked how on earth these oggetti smarriti came to be handed in, or recovered, for that matter, given that there was no indication of a Lost Property Office in the station. I thought of going back and having it out with him. What on earth was going on? How long had those bags been there? Since the war? But the whole experience had had a troubling effect on me: the lost bags and boxes, the wasted hours and years of their custodian. ‘Non esiste,’ I whispered. I decided to forget my bag, trusting that my students would have backup copies of their theses on their computers.

  IN CENTRALE’S TICKET HALL, and on the upper concourse, the Slav immigrants, who never sell things like the Africans or the Chinese, or beg like the Gypsies, hang around the ticket machines. I left out the machines when I talked about ticket buying. About the same height and width as a four-drawer filing cabinet, these machines are also advertised with the red neon logo FastTicket, and they always huddle together in groups of three or four, as if for mutual protection. People do tend to get angry with them. For the miracle of these machines with their touch-sensitive computer screens is that they reproduce all, or almost all, the complications that one can come across when purchasing a ticket in Italy.

  You touch the screen and are told to choose a language. Images of flags, German, French, British, apparently wrapped round globe-like balls, help you make your choice. You touch it again to let it know whether you want information or a ticket. A list of a dozen major destinati
ons are immediately proposed, but if you want to travel anywhere else you must touch OTHER. An alphabet appears. You start touching the appropriate letters. V-E-R-O. With each addition, you home in on a smaller list of stations. Now you must choose between Verona Porta Nuova and Verona Porta Vescovo. There is no indication for the uninitiated as to which might be the main station.

  When you have chosen your destination, you are asked what date you plan to travel. Today, tomorrow, or some time in the future. A calendar appears. You can buy a ticket for months ahead. With that choice behind you, a timetable appears, a list of trains of all different kinds at different hours. You touch your train. First class or second? Do you want to reserve a seat? A window seat? A corridor? And what kind of ticket do you want, what kind of reductions are you eligible for? Hesitate too long and the screen will return to its default setting. I have seen first-timers on the brink of tears.

  So just as for any bureaucratic adventure in Italy – registering a car purchase, getting a Christmas parcel through customs – there is always some private agency willing, at a price, to step in and remove the anxiety of a direct confrontation with a public service employee, so at the railway station young Slav boys and girls will offer to mediate between you and a ticket machine programmed by a public service employee.

  A polite twelve-year-old with a strong accent offers to work the ticket screen for a confused signora. She is bejewelled and smart in a frilly, old-fashioned, southern way, with hair permed to a helmet and powdery wrinkles. He has a thin little nose, clear skin and shrewd, darting black eyes. ‘Grazie,’ she says, for he has already stepped in.

  ‘Where you go?’

  ‘Salerno.’

  How quickly the boy’s fingers move over the screen with its rapidly dissolving numbers and colours!

  ‘Train in twenty minutes. You want return?’

  His Italian is terrible, but he works the machine so fast it’s hard to keep up.

  ‘You want the first class? You pay cash?’

  ‘Si?’

  Cash! Incredibly, the woman hands the boy a €50 note to feed into the machine. And he feeds it in! I had feared the worst. At the end of all this, he hopes there will be a tip for him, of course. Anyone who understands these machines deserves one. Or perhaps, since you can purchase these tickets with a credit card, he wouldn’t be unhappy if someone hurried off leaving an American Express in the slot; the mechanism doesn’t oblige you to reclaim the card before delivering the ticket.

  The boy feeds in the €50 note, then gathers the change that clatters into the returned coins tray below. Politely, he hands it, all of it, to the signora. She leaves him €1. He smiles and makes a small bow. I feel humbled by such trust and generosity. Why am I so suspicious? Alas, with all their complications, their apparent covering of every base, the machines don’t offer Intercity supplementi separate from Intercity tickets, and so a man who has an annual season ticket for the Interregionale but wishes to make his return journey on an Intercity is condemned to the ticket windows. And if the queues are too long he may end up going home on a slow old Interregionale after all.

  SINCE I USUALLY ARRIVE at the station shortly before seven in the evening and won’t be home till nine, I’m often tempted to grab a bite. What’s on offer at Milano Centrale? There’s the free shop, the self bar, the stand-up cafe (with one counter inside and one counter out), and the traditional, sit-down, table-service cafe. What the free in free shop refers to is anyone’s guess. Perhaps it has the same significance as the star in Eurostar. You enter through a tight, brightly chromed turnstile and at once face one of those Italian situations that are so character-forming. Arranged around a corner is a long counter selling a wide variety of freshly made sandwiches. A crowd forms along the whole counter, or rather mills around the apex of the corner like a busy eddy in a rough river. There is no question of a proper queue. Perhaps the FREE stands for free-for-all, you think. Behind the counter are two acned and bewildered youngsters, one replenishing the sandwiches, one serving the customers. He or she who shouts loudest is served first, regardless of when he or she arrived – unless, that is, the person serving takes a dislike to you. You have overdone it. You have offended him in some way. Then you could be stuck here for a while.

  The proper approach is to assume the face of one who is harassed, about to miss a train, and yet absolutely understanding of the pressure the server is under. Above all, never waste time with questions about what’s in the sandwiches. The short, sharp, polite request, even over the heads of a dozen others, is always rewarded. I have become an expert.

  ‘Ciabatta con crudo!’ I shout. ‘Per favore!’

  And I’m gone!

  The SELF BAR is another interesting use of English. What it amounts to is a posh-looking vending machine – there’s one on every platform – about three yards long by six feet high, oval in shape, with food products on one side and drinks on the other. Presumably the designers were aware that the English expression is self-service, but of the two words they clearly felt the positive one was self. I have an aversion to buying food from machines. The only thing that seems to get eaten is my money. I pass by. I do not even examine what’s on offer. No doubt I’m old-fashioned.

  Which leaves the two cafes. For any curious traveller, the large, table-service bar at the end of the upper concourse (on the far right as you emerge from the stairs) is a must for understanding the abyss in Italy between the private and public sectors, a psychological as much as an economic abyss.

  I think I can say without fear of contradiction that in general there is no city in the world where the coffee experience is better arranged than in Milan. The barmen in the thousands of small cafes around the town are never temps, or students, or would-be actors going through hard times. They know how to make coffee. That’s their life. Above all, they know exactly the consistency and temperature that the foam on a cappuccino should have.

  At the small bar on the busy circular road near the university where I teach, the barman sprinkles chocolate on your espresso before adding the foam, then a deft wriggle of the wrist as the milk pours from the jug creates the most elegant patterns: spirals, roses, concentric circles. ‘Every cappuccino I make,’ he tells me earnestly, ‘must be the best the customer has ever drunk.’

  This man – in his early thirties, I’d guess – is at home in his job. He knows all his customers, their likes and dislikes. He is not studying to become a computer programmer or trying to write a novel or taking days off for theatre auditions. He works very fast and can talk football or politics as he does so. He’s an Inter supporter. When you take your cup from his hands you can feel sure that the next few minutes will be exactly the break you were after. And all this is done without that horrible pretension that hangs around the celebrated coffee houses of Paris with their silly red awnings and clutter of wicker chairs. In Milan, at street level at least, everything is natural, busy, fast and right.

  The station is different. The large old bar here occupies the whole of one end of the upper concourse. GRAN BAR, it is unimaginatively called. The letters are a yard-high and illuminated from behind by neon, but the white plastic is grubby and fading. Beneath the letters is a long horizontal line of neon, with a blue-and-yellow pattern, designed to imitate an awning (actually it took me quite a while to realise that this must have been the desired effect).

  Unlike all the other outlets in the station, the Gran Bar does not present itself as an intruder, a kiosk camping in a mausoleum, but as an integral part of the original design. So its floor is the same grey stone floor of the whole upper concourse, and shining down from its ceiling are two huge glass chandeliers, each with thirty or forty light bulbs, artefacts that might well have been in vogue when the station was built.

  It sounds promising, doesn’t it? There should be a bar in grand style, you feel, in a station of this grandeur. And why not call it Gran Bar, in the end? The waiters wear white uniforms, and this, too, is as it should be. I’m willing to pay a little more for
uniformed waiter service, for luxury and comfort and liveried whiteness.

  Alas, few experiences could be more depressing than the Gran Bar at Milano Centrale. The last refurbishment, in a reddish-orange with black lines, is looking seedy now. The smeary glass window through which you can gaze out into the station is set in decaying ironwork. The illuminated adverts for ice cream and soda seem to refer to the products of a decade ago.

  For a bar meant for table service there are remarkably few tables over a very large surface area, as if perhaps the important thing was to be able to pass easily between them with some cleaning machine. And the tables are small, with yellow tablecloths and incongruous plastic chairs of a dark plum colour. The grey floor dominates. Pigeons slither across it, perfectly camouflaged. The few clients are almost all elderly people on their own. Can they really be here to catch a train? you wonder. They seem to be people who have fallen out of time. Perhaps the ghosts who haunt empty trains are allowed to meet here for their coffee breaks.