Italian Ways

by Tim Parks

The departures board now told me that my train was delayed for eighty minutes. This meant I could safely sit down for a coffee. There may be no waiting room when you need it, but there is a choice of bars: a regular Trenitalia bar at one end of the station and a McDonald’s franchise that combines Italian bar and McDonald’s counter at the other. The latter has the great advantage that seating is free, and since eighty minutes is eighty minutes, that’s where I headed.

  I got my cappuccino and croissant, sat down, and began to think about Berlusconi’s smile. What a strange mixture it was, I thought, of comfortable self-congratulation (I’m a hugely successful man, you can rely on me) and victimhood (I am a scapegoat who has been treated badly), as if he were both a first-class Freccia traveller and a long-suffering victim standing in the corridor of a packed Regionale. Quite how Berlusconi manages to convey these contradictory impressions I’m not sure, but they seem to contain a paradox essential to the contemporary Italian mindset: we are simultaneously well off and not well off; we deserve excellent services but we are already paying too much for them; we are confident and hard done by.

  At this point I had to move my seat. The fact is that with the station open but the waiting room closed, all those poor folks who had somehow got through the night in the icy waste of the piazza outside were invading McDonald’s, where indeed half the tables had been roped off, no doubt to discourage this loitering. I noticed a Gypsy woman at the bar getting a flask filled with hot water and then asking for the key to the toilet. The station toilets cost €1 per person to use, but if you buy something in the bar you can ask for a key to the small toilet there and then take the whole family in to use it for free. Quite a saving. Not that this woman had bought anything; rather she had asked the favour of a refill of hot water; but she got the key anyway, and who would begrudge it to her? There were four or five children in tow. A world without free public lavatories is a grim world indeed. But maybe it is a grim world and that’s an end to it. Certainly you can be sure that the Gypsy woman in question is not contributing to the construction of public lavatories. All this stuff was going through my head when an elderly man sat heavily on the chair beside me emitting a smell so powerful that I stood up at once and took my cup and remaining crumbs to another table, where two students were amazingly finding the energy to kiss and fondle at seven o’clock on a freezing Monday morning. I wondered for a moment if I should check the departures board again – for there is no information inside the bar, no announcements, no screens – but I had plenty of time.

  Berlusconi, I thought. That smile. Not that he personally is responsible for everything that’s happening in Italy today – how could one man ever be, however often he has been prime minister? But you really don’t need to think hard to see a connection between the rise to power of a man whose fortune has been made by creating a vast TV and advertising empire and an Italy where one tries to resolve any and every contradiction between what people expect and what they are willing to pay for it by turning public services into advertising spaces and retail outlets. Sometimes, moving through an Italian station or airport today, it feels as though the selling power of cute buttocks, sweet smile and pert breasts is really all that stands between Italy and economic meltdown. It does seem a lot to ask of the girls.

  Brushing the crumbs off my coat, studiously ignoring the antics of the two youngsters across the table, I left the warm bar for the freezing station to check where we were up to with the Frecciargento’s delay. Anything over ninety minutes and I would go home, I thought.

  I couldn’t find the train on the departures board. This was odd. Other trains were posted for Munich, Trieste, Turin, Mantua, but not the 6.55 to Rome via Florence. Puzzled, I hurried up to the platform. There was no one there. The train wasn’t indicated. I went down to the main concourse, but the information office didn’t open till 8.30, and there were long queues at the ticket windows. Eventually I found a man in uniform who didn’t seem to be going anywhere in particular.

  What had become of the 6.55 to Rome?

  He presumed it had left by now. It was 7.20, after all.

  ‘But they announced an eighty-minute delay.’

  His eyes narrowed and he became cautious. ‘If it were delayed eighty minutes it would still be on the board.’

  ‘They announced the delay, I went to the bar and now it’s disappeared.’

  He shook his head. The 6.55, he said, actually started its journey from the station here in Verona. It was thus unlikely that they would signal such a long delay, since the train would have been right there overnight. At most they might have had to run a check on some systems because of the cold.

  ‘They did announce an eighty-minute delay. I didn’t imagine it.’

  Picking up my accent, he shook his head and said in comically poor English, ‘Perraps you ’ave made the mistake.’

  ‘I have been in Italy thirty years,’ I told him. ‘There have been periods when I have practically lived on Trenitalia. I did not make a mistake.’

  He sighed and began to move away. He had work to do. If I had a complaint to make, there were proper channels.

  Furious, but above all bewildered, I drove home, booted up my computer and opened Viaggio Treno. This is one of the truly great novelties of the past ten years, and I take this opportunity to salute and congratulate whoever invented it: Viaggio Treno is a page on Trenitalia’s website that gives you the exact position of all the trains in the country. A map of Italy opens with double lines indicating the main train routes in each direction; you can choose the region that interests you and home in on that. If the line is dark blue there is a train on it; if it’s light blue, there isn’t. You then click on your dark blue line and a small table appears indicating the various trains on the line, their present positions, any eventual delays. In short, it’s as if you had a huge toy train set in your front room with all the frecce and Intercities and Interregionali moving back and forth on it from the top to the bottom of the peninsula.

  Sure enough, the Verona to Bologna line was dark blue. I clicked. The Frecciargento 9461 had now passed through Poggio Rusco and was running just ten minutes late. It must have left just as I settled down in the bar. Unfortunately, my ticket was valid for that journey only. Could I claim my money back for a train that had departed more or less on time? No. Could I ever prove that a delay of eighty minutes had been posted? Probably not. Could I claim expenses from Palazzo Strozzi for a ticket I had bought on a train I had not boarded? Hardly. But the most curious thing of all, I realised now, was that I had appeared to be the only person at the station who had missed that train, the only one rushing around in an angry panic at 7.20. There were two explanations for this: first, that the other passengers were perhaps even now in McDonald’s waiting out the eighty minutes; second, that the other passengers were not so foolish as to have trusted the delay announcement and, knowing the train started its journey from Verona, had hung around, on the freezing platform, or at least somewhere in the vicinity where they could see the departures board and hear the station announcements and above all the coincidenze, which, as I said, you cannot do in McDonald’s. Of these two hypotheses I preferred the first, but all my experience told me the second must be true. Never lower your guard with Trenitalia.

  THE FOLLOWING DAY I boarded the same train at 6.45, had an uneventful journey, and was able to see for myself that the Frecciargento did indeed complete this trip of about 130 arduous miles in just an hour and a half. The train races south over the open plain and the broad waters of the Po to Bologna, then hurtles under the Apennines through tunnel after tunnel, reaching speeds of almost two hundred miles an hour. Distances that in 1848 took Garibaldi weeks in his revolutionary back and forth across these mountains are eaten up in minutes. It’s a fantastic achievement.

  The woman sitting across the aisle from me thought so too. When the ticket inspector arrived, shortly before Bologna, she had no ticket to show him. Rather grand, in her sixties, but frayed at the edges, wearing a dark red coat that
she hadn’t taken off despite the excellent heating, she began to protest that she did have her ticket somewhere. Must have. Her son had bought it for her. She had put it in her handbag. She distinctly remembered. The inspector was patient but something in the woman’s voice was beginning to give her away as not quite compos mentis. ‘You people are always bothering me,’ she suddenly announced. Her mouth seemed strangely big and ill-defined, as if her features were as frayed as her coat. ‘That’s the trouble with this country. The honest people are harassed while the rich get off scotfree, the cheats, the tax dodgers, the presumptuous.’

  Unnecessarily, the inspector remarked that it was important for passengers to pay for their tickets; otherwise the railway would go broke. The woman met the objection with another tirade of abuse. Why didn’t he believe her when she told him she had the ticket? Did he think she was a liar? Her voice strained with righteous indignation. The more animated she became, the more evident was the decay in her face. The inspector began to fill out a form for a fine. It was a long form; €60 were mentioned. Plus the price of the ticket. These inspectors always have to work smoothing layers of carbon paper on a book or bag and touching malfunctioning biros to their lips while the speeding train packed with revolutionary technologies sways and accelerates and brakes. The woman seemed alarmed and her voice became almost hysterical. She would never pay a fine, she yelled, never never never. Because she did have a ticket, if only she could find it. In the meantime, she had given up any pretence of looking.

  ‘I won’t give you my name,’ she told him abruptly when he asked for it. She folded her arms in defiance. ‘I don’t have an ID with me.’

  By now everyone was watching. I had been trying to work, making notes for the meeting that lay ahead, but it was impossible. The inspector told her in that case she would have to get off the train at Bologna.

  She wouldn’t, she told him. She had a ticket to Rome. She was going to Rome.

  ‘If you have a ticket, show me,’ the inspector said.

  She couldn’t; she had lost it, she told him flatly. ‘Can’t you see that?’ Her thick white hair, through which she kept passing one hand, now revealed itself as dishevelled, unwashed, uncared for. From seeming quite an ordinary passenger it became clear that she was one of the dispossessed. She should not be among us.

  ‘I will not get off this train!’ she screamed.

  Perhaps because of this transformation on her part, the inspector passed from being admirably patient to cruelly perverse as he took pleasure in dragging the scene out, explaining at great length the procedure she was facing. If she did not show him a ticket he was obliged to write out a fine. If she couldn’t or wouldn’t pay the ticket plus the fine of €60 on the spot, she would be obliged to disembark the train at the first station and pay a fine of €200 from home. If she refused to leave the train, he would invite two policemen to get on board at Bologna and remove her forcibly.

  The woman began to appeal to the passengers around her. There were people in this country, she shouted, daily stealing hundreds of thousands of euros from the public purse, and this arrogant man was victimising a poor pensioner travelling to see her sick old aunt in Rome. It was a scandal.

  As ever in Italy, the acknowledged lawlessness of the country’s ruling class offers an excellent alibi for smaller offenders. One of the reasons for endlessly voting for corrupt politicians is that your own misdemeanours seem trivial by comparison.

  ‘The sharks are all freeloading and then they pick on a poor woman who has lost her ticket,’ she wailed.

  Nobody wanted to get involved. This is a business train for businesspeople.

  ‘My poor auntie is dying,’ the woman now began to cry. ‘She’s ninety-two.’ Her face betrayed a desperation that went far beyond any issue of tickets or fines, or even dying aunties. It had to do with dignity and humiliation, pure and simple. ‘What difference does it make whether I am on the train or not? There are plenty of seats free. It won’t cost them any more to get to Rome just because I’m on it.’

  This was true, of course, but a dangerous road to go down.

  ‘Two policemen will come to remove you,’ the inspector assured her, impressively unimpressed by her antics. He moved on down the aisle as she shouted after him. I wondered if perhaps he was bluffing. He hadn’t actually gone to the trouble of making a call to the police in her presence. However, after huffing and puffing in a loud voice for the remaining minutes to Bologna, the woman suddenly stood up, very efficiently gathered three small bags, and got off the train in a completely relaxed fashion, as if she were just another passenger glad to reach her destination.

  ‘Happens every day,’ the inspector explained on his return a little later. ‘They get on, get themselves thrown off at the next station, then get on the next train and get a free ride to the next station and so on, till they get where they’re going. You can’t throw them out of the window, you can’t make them pay money they haven’t got, the police can’t be bothered to arrest them. Since the fast trains only stop at Bologna and Florence, she’ll be in Rome before the day is out, if that’s really where she wants to go. But maybe she just wants to keep warm and will get on the first train to somewhere else. Or back to Verona.’

  On arrival in Florence, I found the train stopped not, as I had expected, at Santa Maria Novella, the town’s main station, just five minutes’ walk from Palazzo Strozzi, but at the sad suburban station of Firenze Campo Marte. Could I, I asked a capotreno hurrying along the platform, use my Freccia ticket on a local train to Santa Maria Novella, or would I have to go to the ticket office for another ticket?

  ‘Platform one,’ he said as he waved. ‘Plenty of trains.’

  ‘But do I need a new ticket? I just came from Verona on the Frecciargento, but now I see the ticket is just to Campo Marte.’

  He was already off, speaking over his shoulder. ‘They won’t fine you,’ he said with an enigmatic laugh.

  So, I reflected, my ticket was not officially valid for Santa Maria Novella, but nobody would have the courage to complain, since my investment in the Frecciargento was considerable and was supposed to take me to Florence, not to an outlying station. I was one of the blessed. To him that hath …

  THE BLESSED UNDERSTAND ENGLISH. They have credit. They buy their tickets online. They don’t speak dialect but proper, accentless Italian. Their values are cleanliness and speed. I think it was standing on that platform at Firenze Campo Marte that I first heard the new announcers whose voices you now hear in every station, large or small, from the far north of Italy to the deep south, imposing the new, suave Trenitalia feel on the whole peninsula; first a man’s voice, Italian, young, educated and eager to persuade, without any regional inflections, then a woman’s voice, in English. She too seems young, efficient, knowledgeable and unplaceable.

  Unplaceable in England, that is, but very English, not American or even transatlantic. The funny thing is that although she reads the Italian names of the stations – Roma instead of an English Rome, Firenze instead of Florence, Napoli instead of Naples – she pronounces them with a strong, even exaggerated, English accent, making no concessions at all to the Italian vowel sounds or rolled r’s. So we have, Roe-mah, Na-poe-lee, Mi-lah-noe, Fi-ren-say, and so on. The effect is hilarious, but funniest of all is her pronunciation of Trenitalia, which she manages to rhyme with genitalia. Since we all know that Italy is pronounced with the a of ‘fat’, not of ‘fate’, it’s hard to imagine how anyone could make a mistake like this; indeed, it begins to sound as if the announcements were deliberately making fun of the Englishman’s, or in this case Englishwoman’s, famed incompetence with foreign languages. Or maybe some PR man who has learned to pronounce the Queen’s English at some upmarket language school has imagined that English people will only recognise the names if pronounced this way, despite the fact that the English announcements are not uniquely for the English, but for every foreign national with no Italian. In any event, I feel sure that this woman knows the proper pronunciati
ons and is hamming it. She’s having fun. And you can see a lot of Italian passengers are enjoying it too. For them it has the welcome effect of making the speakers of this globally dominant language seem stupid. Trenitayliah five seven zero to Ve-ne-ziaah … Trenitayliah two one nine to Pad-you-ah, Trenitayliah eight six one to Doe-moe-dossoe-lah …

  NEEDLESS TO SAY, TRENITALIA’S reorganisation of the train service into a world of first- and second-class citizens would not be complete without a complete overhaul of ticketing policy, which now entirely conditions these trips of mine to Florence. In the nineties there was a maximum promiscuity and flexibility between trains and people, as if passengers on a Regionale from Bergamo to Treviglio actually belonged to the same species as those signori and signore travelling on a Super Rapido from Milan to Turin. All tickets were valid for sixty days, and all could be upgraded with supplements. Now instead we have maximum segregation and rigidity; yet it was all done so stealthily, so gradually, that none of us really saw the logic of it until the operation was complete.

  For me the moment of transition, or awakening, definitely came one morning in 2008 on a Verona–Milan Intercity. I was in the perfect situation of sharing a compartment with a man and a woman both as eager as myself to read and work. Then all of a sudden, a clamour of children! English children! There were scores of them. ‘Quiet, kids! Quiet!’ A man in Boy Scout shorts and sandals with socks peered into our compartment. He began to look at a ticket and to compare the numbers on it with the seat numbers indicated outside our compartment. The sticky fingers and red noses of his charges pressed against the glass beside him. But I felt confident. There had been no cards to indicate reservations. I’m careful about that stuff. The compartment was free for the whole journey.

  But Sandals and Socks opens the door and tells us in halting Italian that all our places are reserved. ‘PREE-NOH-TAA-TEE,’ he said. Prenotati = booked. The poor man seemed embarrassed to have to tell us this. ‘Noy’ – he pointed his fingers at himself and the children making manic faces through the glass – ‘booked, pree-noh-taa-tee.’