Italian Ways

by Tim Parks

  So from the time I started using the station I learned to ignore the slowly rising statues on the escalators and would dash to left or right and race up one of the grand granite stairways – forty-eight steps – with their polished marble balustrades and brass banisters beneath Fascist friezes celebrating an accelerated future as imagined in the 1920s – steamers, planes and trains, but not escalators.

  For many years I taught an evening class that finished at 8.30, leaving me just thirty-five minutes, twenty-five of them on the metro, to make the last Intercity to Verona, at 9.05. After a while I realised I was measuring my ageing in terms of the energy with which I tackled those stairs. At thirty-five I could do the steps two at a time from the metro platform to the ticket hall and again from the ticket hall to the platforms – a total of five floors, I’d say – arriving at my train bathed in sweat but barely panting. At forty I was panting hard but still forcing myself. At forty-five I was obliged to take the top section just one stair at a time and still feared my legs might buckle under me or my heart burst. I would collapse into my seat with pulse thumping and a taste of blood in my throat. At fifty I had long given up those evening classes but nevertheless stepped briskly up the stairs, noticing that even when you take them one at a time you arrive earlier than the escalator zombies.

  Then one ordinary evening late in 2008, returning from Milan to Verona, I found myself in a labyrinth. The monolith had been counting us down to the departure of that first high-speed train – we all knew exactly when that was going to happen – but the new station was unveiled quite casually. One day the covers were all in place; the next they came down. As I was passing through the ticket barrier from the metro, still one floor underground, a tunnel beckoned to my left where none had been before. Stazione Ferroviaria, the sign announced. Instead of climbing the stairs to street level one could now walk straight through to the station. Who would decline such an invitation? However, at the other end of the tunnel, I couldn’t find the escalator that ought to shoot me up to the rail platforms where I and everybody else needed to be. Instead there were shops selling sports goods, underwear and cosmetics. The only way to move upwards was a very long, very shiny ‘thing’ that was neither an escalator with steps nor the flat Trav-O-Lator that speeds up walking along long airport corridors, but a combination of the two, a sort of conveyor belt rising, slowly, at an angle of no more than ten degrees. Actually, now that I lifted my head and looked around, I saw there were two of these things. The odd part was that instead of moving forward, towards the platforms above, each set off perpendicular to the direction we were headed in, one to the left and one to the right. I went and stood on the one to my left. Despite its extraordinary slowness – I have since timed it out at one minute and fifty seconds – everybody was standing still on both sides; there was no way you could hurry by.

  Then this thing, usually described with recourse to French as a tapis roulant, but which I have also seen translated on the FS website as a ‘treadmill’ – this strange silver-and-glass thing took its freight of scores upon scores of passengers plus their clutter of luggage only as far as the Sala delle Carozze. That is, having gone through the tunnel and now up the tapis roulant, we were still outside the main station itself; in the past I could get here in about twenty seconds using the stairs.

  Now I hurried through to the station where I needed a ticket. But the last ticket windows beside the stairs in the main hall had been closed. Again a tunnel opened where once there had been only solid walls; it bore the legend Biglietteria e Binari: Tickets and Tracks. Intensely fluorescent after the marble-softened daylight of the main hall, this unexpected burrowing was to the left of the main central escalators, which were now both coming down rather than going up. Weird! How were we supposed to get up to the platforms?

  The walls of this new tunnel were formed by sparkling shop windows. There were about thirty yards of this, then a space of thousands of square feet opened out that none of us had ever seen before; it was as if we’d been admitted to some fantastic grotto deep inside a hill whose steep slopes in the past we had simply climbed straight up. Here, two more tapis roulants, again departing perpendicular to the direction you wanted to move in, headed upwards, while beyond them a line of perhaps twenty glass doors invited you into the ticket office at the very back of the grotto. So now, once you had bought your ticket, you had to backtrack through the glass doors to these tapis roulants, which took you up with interminable leisureliness, not directly to the tracks but to a whole mezzanine floor, another novelty, where you could stop and explore another line of shop windows or turn round and board yet a third tapis roulant, which doubled back on the second to drag you up, finally, bewildered, and above all late, to platform level.

  In short, a building designed as a magnificent thoroughfare taking you straight down from train to street or directly up from street to train and offering you on the way and without going out of your way the simple services of food, newspapers and tickets, had been transformed into an underground maze of zigzagging conveyor belts moving perpendicular to your intended destination and hiding the most essential requirements deep in buried dead ends.

  Why?

  Elementary. To take you past the 108 shopfronts that now invite you in Stazione Centrale. So while fuming and fretting at the thought that your train might depart at any moment, you can contemplate designer sunglasses, ladies’ undergarments, bathing costumes, bestsellers, more ladies’ undergarments, the latest Mac, iPhone, iPod and PC, running shoes, sportswear, men’s suits, yet more ladies’ undergarments, and so on. Or alternatively, if weary of images of bright fabrics stretched over pert buttocks and breasts (and surely we belong to the first generation for whom it is possible to tire of such images), you can raise your eyes to where the renovators have indeed done a magnificent job of cleaning the elegant stone arches, sculptures and mosaics of the 1920s building; though here again, images of provocatively worn underwear hanging on huge placards from the ceiling break up the sober pomp that might otherwise have helped you resign yourself to missing your train.

  Is it incompetence?

  No. It is desperation.

  Trenitalia has a massive overall debt of more than €6 billion. The government’s social policy, as expressed in their franchise, doesn’t allow them to raise fares to realistic levels and they have already laid off as many staff as is politically acceptable. Something ‘creative’ had to be done. People had to be encouraged to spend the money they weren’t spending on tickets to purchase consumer goods, mainly luxury consumer goods, with the FS taking a percentage of every sale. Just as when one doesn’t want to pay for website content one has to wait while dull advertisements pop up and fade, so now one would have to factor an extra five minutes into each journey to be transported as slowly as possible past shiny shop windows.

  Will it work?

  I fear not. On my next visit to Milan I studied the station situation carefully: although the metro stairway I had used to use to reach street level had been closed, there was still one available for people entering the metro from the piazza. So it was possible to ignore the signposting and the new tunnel, to walk straight up to ground level, and then to climb those forty-eight 1920s granite steps to the platforms without being drawn into the commercial labyrinth beneath. In fact, these once-daunting stairs were suddenly far busier than they had ever been; to quite a lot of people stone stairs began to feel like progress. A month or so after the great unveiling, a website was launched offering tips on how not to miss your train at Milano Centrale; the most obvious was: don’t stop to buy anything.

  fn1 For these quotations I am indebted to Stefano Maggi’s excellent book Le ferrovie (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2003).

  Chapter 4

  MILANO–FIRENZE

  NO SOONER HAD we got used to this revolution in mobilità, or lack of it, than the countdown outside the station was suddenly over. On 14 December 2008, the much-heralded train departed and, yes, arrived in Bologna just one hour later – right on tim
e. Soon it would be pushing on to Florence, then Rome, then Naples. Soon it would be heading west from Milan to Novara, then Turin. By 2010 hourly trains were departing from Milan and racing three hundred miles non-stop to Rome in just two hours, fifty minutes. Imagine Boston to New York, city centre to city centre, in an hour and forty-five, or London to Edinburgh in three hours, and you have the idea. Forget the train of the living dead. Forget the first-class fiasco on the Venezia– Milano Interregionale. This is serious! All of a sudden Trenitalia was winning back passengers from car and plane.

  But how exactly was it paid for? It’s reckoned that to lay the six hundred miles of seamless rails that only the high-speed trains can use all the way from Naples to Turin, cutting new tunnels and building new viaducts, must have cost some €150 billion, a simply vast amount of money that was never written into any government budget. At a certain point the European Community intervened to insist that the huge loans taken out by the rail company figure as part of the Italian national debt and not simply as private company debts, since everyone knew that in the last resort they were underwritten by the state. Aside from the loans, it’s clear that a significant part of the government grant that was supposed to support humbler rail services through stations like Porta Vescovo was switched to investment in the high-speed project and quite possibly the redevelopment of Milano Centrale into an upmarket shopping mall. So the living dead are pushed deeper into their unquiet graves to breathe life and speed into those who can pay to travel fast enough to have time for a spot of shopping at each end. To him that hath, more shall be given: and from him that hath not, even that which he hath – a halfway decent regional rail service, practical stations with reasonable mobilità – shall be taken away.

  All the same, as Mark Twain concluded his discussion of mad Italian spending on the railways in the 1860s, ‘it is an ill wind that blows nobody good’. Up and running, enjoyed and used by thousands, the high-speed trains have become their own justification. I for one would never wish they hadn’t been built.

  THE OLD NAMES ARE GONE. That was inevitable. Gone the Gianduia to Venice, gone the Michelangelo to Rome, gone the Andrea Doria to Genoa. Gone the proud announcements reverberating through the station and the beautiful words appearing on the departures board. Every big change in the railways brings a revolution in nomenclature and ticketing. So these screamingly fast new trains are called frecce, arrows. This switch back to Italian suggests a new pride and confidence; the Frecciarossa, or Red Arrow, built in Italy by Fiat and Associates, travels at 200 miles per hour, running exclusively on dedicated rails. After the Red Arrow there is also the Frecciargento, the Silver Arrow, which goes at 150 miles per hour on dedicated and ordinary rails, and the Frecciabianca, or White Arrow, which goes at 125 miles per hour on the old, ordinary rails we know so well. It was the arrival of the Frecciarossa, which takes you from Milan to Florence in an hour and forty-five, and again of the Frecciargento, which does Verona to Florence in an hour and thirty, that made it possible for me, in 2009, to make the major mistake of accepting an invitation to curate an art exhibition in Florence.

  Back in 2005 I had published a little book, Medici Money, which talked about the way a tension between moneymaking and medieval Christianity had flowered in the ambiguous but indisputably beautiful territory of Renaissance art. The ban on usury, a word that at that time referred to any interest-bearing loans, expressed the Church’s rejection of the idea that the mind should focus on money and social mobility. People should accept their position on the medieval estates and concentrate their aspirations on the afterlife. However, the bankers, or some of them, showed everyone that getting rich was not just about counting florins; they also invested in education, art and architecture, seduced the clergy by financing major Church renovation projects, and in the process commissioned some of the finest paintings and sculptures ever made. So the once cold and austere spaces of a timeless liturgy began to take on a decidedly bourgeois, well-dressed fashion feel, something no one had expected or planned for. In the end the tension between Christian purists who resented the mercenary invasion of their sanctuaries and the wealthy classes who felt that their taste, hard work and charity should surely get them straight to heaven, exploded first in Savonarola’s Bonfire of the Vanities, then in Luther’s Reformation.

  It’s curious. There’s a direct link between the medieval Church’s objection to social mobility and to Pope Gregory XVI’s 1840s condemnation of the railways as the work of Satan. In the early nineteenth century the Papal States of central Italy were among the most backward and static territories in Europe, perhaps nearer to the world of the medieval estates than to our highly mobile capitalism today. The train, Gregory realised, would allow people to get moving, from home to a distant place of work, or from one town to another. Doing so, they would lose contact with their proper place in the world; free from the watchful eyes of parents, partners and children, men and women would start living double lives. They would no longer know who they really were or where they should be. Trains, Gregory decided, and in general rapid constant movement from one reality to another, were contro natura, against nature, in exactly the same way that usury, blasphemy and homosexuality were contro natura in the world of Dante’s Inferno. They were pernicious temptations to become something other than what God had planned for us.

  Today’s Pope has his own dedicated Frecciarossa when he travels. A YouTube video shows crowds on a platform in Spoleto, Umbria, waving as the papal train passes through without stopping. This was 2011. It’s a strange meeting of ancient and modern. The streamlined nose of the Freccia and its darkened, shockproof windows slide smoothly by while a bunch of celebrants, with Spoleto’s mayor at their head, cheer loudly. The camera searches through the windows of the passing train, eventually finding a man in white robes propped in a standing position – these trains can sway dangerously through stations – raising an arm to greet people whom he can’t possibly see. For perhaps a second his ghostly salute flashes across the screen left to right, more fugitive and unnatural than any appearance of the Madonna. The good citizens of Spoleto must have wondered whether they had really seen him. For all the derision that met his objections, Pope Gregory, I’m sure, would feel he had understood trains perfectly.

  In any event, this book of mine had led to an invitation to curate an exhibition in Florence at Palazzo Strozzi, a sort of Donald Trump ostentation of the fifteenth century, built, massively and threateningly, with money from the Strozzi family bank. Since regular trips to Florence would be required, the high-speed miracle made possible something that years before I might have wisely refused, since this was a complete distraction from my ordinary life. All of a sudden here I was a regular traveller on a work of Satan, shuttling back and forth to Florence at demonic speeds, to organise an exhibition on another of Satan’s masterpieces, the banking techniques that enabled the Medici et al. to circumvent the usury ban and turn the churches of the Renaissance into extensions of their living rooms, in much the same way that the austere Fascist trappings of Milano Centrale have been turned into a version of Macy’s.

  It didn’t start well. My Frecciargento was scheduled to leave Verona Porta Nuova shortly before seven o’clock on a February morning with the temperature some fifteen degrees below zero, a once-a-year occurrence in this part of the world. Finding that many of the trains were delayed due to frozen switches, and in particular that my Freccia was posting a half-hour delay, I climbed the stairs to the platform to see if the train was there by any chance and, hopefully, heated. There was no sign of it.

  The air was bitter. My overcoat wasn’t made for it. I scuttled downstairs back into the station, but the waiting room was not yet open. This waiting room, which was notorious for not allowing eating or drinking, a rule regularly policed by unexpectedly zealous station staff, has since been closed to make way – surprise, surprise – for a small area of shops. In the meantime the station, like many others in northern Italy, has been filled with TV screens, scores of them. Th
ey are attractive, flat screens in polished metal frames, placed, for example, above your head as you climb down any of the three staircases on the station’s twelve platforms, and delivering not, as you might expect, information about train departures and arrivals, but non-stop advertisements, each of about thirty seconds. So moving through the station shortly before seven o’clock on this freezing morning, looking for somewhere warm to wait out the delay, I was able to observe, as always, luscious close-ups of ladies’ undergarments hugging perfect, perfumed flesh, images of pasta disappearing between lusciously perfect female lips, luscious breasts on a perfect young woman changing her clothes in a car, and so on. There were also many large posters of Silvio Berlusconi hanging on thin chains from the high ceiling. An election had been announced. The brief government run by Romano Prodi, a ramshackle coalition of the left, had given up the ghost.