Italian Ways

by Tim Parks

  Two men now came down the stairs. ‘Do you know which is the direction to the metro?’ They didn’t. They also were looking for the metro. ‘I think it’s this way,’ one of them said. We went down the tunnel, turned a corner, were confronted with other tunnels, escalators. There were the names of roads, there were numbers of platforms, but no signs for the metro. Eventually we climbed stairs to find ourselves on a tarmac pavement running beside a wall beneath an elevated highway. All four of us, now united in our contempt for whoever was responsible for la mobilità in Porta Garibaldi, decided we had better turn right. After five minutes walking in that direction we gave up, turned round and walked ten minutes in the other direction, finally discovering the so-called front of the station and the metro some twenty minutes after our train had dumped us on a gloomy platform. Garibaldi, it has to be said, was famous for being able to lead his men rapidly at night through the most arduous and uncharted terrain.

  So when I went to catch the Italo I left much earlier than theoretically I needed to. This was just as well. RFI had hidden Italo on an underground platform under a little mare’s nest of escalators. As I would soon discover, in all the stations where Italo operates the tension between the new company’s desire to give visibility to its services and the old organisation’s determination that it not be allowed to develop any special profile is everywhere evident. Does a sign indicating where a train leaves from amount to publicity? I suppose if you never wanted the train to exist in the first place, it possibly does. In the same way, Italian taxi drivers are famous for removing signs at airports that indicate where you might catch a cheap bus into town.

  I was travelling not in second class, not in first, not in business, but in ‘Smart’. With this English term, whose many nuances and connotations Italians know nothing of, the shame of the word seconda has been avoided. Interestingly, though, for first class the Italian prima has been kept. Reasons for pride are expressed in our own language; for less gratifying denominations some smart word from some smart international language will do. There is also ‘Club’. For the top of the top we return to airline English. In any event, it’s obvious from the price of my ticket, just €45, that I’m travelling in second.

  During the trip, I thought I’d make a few notes to establish the peculiarity of these new Italo trains as opposed to the frecce: the generosity of the carriages, rather wider and higher than the frecce, with their stylish grey-and-orange fake leather seats; the extraordinarily clean – indeed, spick and span – toilets; the cinema carriage – can you imagine? – where a recent film is projected on decently large screens; in general, a smoother, far more stable and definitely quieter feel to the train. But very soon I put my pen down. The real difference in travelling on Italo has to do with an absence, a strange lightness: there are no Trenitalia personnel and no Trenitalia announcements. The girl who arrived in her smart maroon blazer behaved more like an air hostess than a ticket collector; I even had the illusion that she was there to serve me. As I went to the toilet, a man going in before me turned to allow me to go ahead. ‘No, that’s fine,’ I told him. Only then did I realise that what he was wearing was a kind of grey, dungaree uniform. He was carrying out a routine check of the toilets en voyage. It was hard to believe.

  The Wi-Fi is free, and I went on the Italo website and looked up personale a bordo, on-board personnel. They had avoided the Trenitalia categories by using English for the job descriptions: train manager, train specialist (my man checking the toilets) and, yes, the hostess or steward. There was no mention at all that it was anyone’s duty to look at your ticket. One of the stewards was black; at last.

  I ran a quick Google search on Italo and found an Economist article mentioning the famous fence down at Ostiense in Rome that keeps Italo passengers from their trains. ‘Ingrained hostility to competition,’ the English journalist said, was ‘something the Italians have to look at’. I find this kind of comment so right, but so wrong, as if the government could pass a law to resolve the problem, or as if hostility to competition wasn’t part of a deep ethos that is never going to change here without some massive national upheaval. The Italians invariably produce these monolithic organisations, the Catholic Church, the Ferrovie dello Stato or indeed the state itself, that they both identify with and feel hostile to. Throughout the post-war period the Italian state expanded into so many areas of industry, running some of the largest monopolies in Europe and proving itself one of the most generous sources of pensions and handouts in the whole world. At the local level whole towns are still willing to put their fate in the hands of one man, or company, as was the case with Turin and Fiat, with Parma and the Tanzis, and for a period with Milan and Berlusconi. Beneath all this lies a fear of being exposed to the competitive world and an overwhelming desire for protection; these powerful men, these powerful organisations will look after us. Our identity lies in belonging to them and then loathing them, accepting their bounty and disobeying them, evading their taxes, travelling without tickets, then voting for them, again and again. It is between the need for protection and the dream of liberty that Trenitalia’s Freccia and NTV’s Italo rush by each other on the high-speed lines between Milan and Rome, taking in Cosimo’s Florence on the way. The balance, or imbalance, between the two antithetical impulses can reasonably be measured by the relative sizes of the two companies: NTV has twenty-five trains, albeit of the latest, Italo-French designs. Trenitalia has thousands.

  The main founding partner of NTV is Luca Cordero di Montezemolo, heir to a noble family for many generations hand in glove with the Italian royal family of Savoy. Montezemolo is president of Ferrari, has been executive chairman of Fiat and head of the Confederation of Italian Industry, and sits on the boards of various major companies. His junior partner, with whom he holds a controlling interest in NTV, is Diego Della Valle, heir to a shoe manufacturing empire and owner of Florence’s football club Fiorentina. This is big old north Italian business, backed to the tune of 20 per cent by French railways. Montezemolo and Della Valle must be old acquaintances with those heading Trenitalia and RFI. In the end the Ferrovie dello Stato has nothing to fear from them, the same way that the Fascists had nothing to fear from the big northern industrialists of the twenties and thirties. As long as these men are allowed a share of the action, they will not upset the apple cart.

  Still, they must be made to suffer for their profits. Italo has not been given space to stop at Roma Termini, hub of all mobility in the city. Instead I stepped down at Tiburtina, a smaller, sadder version of Milan’s Porta Garibaldi. I took a picture of the driver climbing down from his futuristic locomotive. He seemed happy enough to be photographed with this great hunk of technology. Ten minutes later, shocked as I always am to see how drab and dingy the Rome metro is, I took another, contrasting picture. At once a uniformed metro man, invested with that air of public officialdom, hurried up to me wagging his finger and warning, in broken English, ‘No photo, no photo. Forbidden!’

  How is it that Italians always know I’m not Italian, even before I speak to them? It’s not that there are not quite a few blue-eyed Italians with light brown hair. I can only suppose there must be subtle signals in the gait and body language that they pick up unconsciously. What’s sad about it is that my accent is never even given a chance to pass muster, since people have already placed me before I open my mouth. It’s frustrating after thirty years in the country. Whether it is really forbidden to take photos in metro stations as in train stations I have no idea. In the end it makes no difference. I waited for the man to move off, took another couple of pictures, then headed off for a quiet weekend with friends.

  ‘YOU DON’T HAVE TO explain anything to me.’ The young man shakes his head. ‘Nothing.’

  About one thing I was wrong. Compartments do still exist. South of Rome. That was the big discovery on boarding the 11.39 to Palermo from Roma Termini. It would be amply confirmed in the days to come. In the south they still have compartments; they still have the old Intercities. They eve
n call them Intercities. In fact, they still have lots of old things and old names down south that we’re rapidly forgetting about in Milan. For some reason this puts me in an excellent mood, as when you discover that a model of car you owned twenty years ago, or a word you once used and had forgotten, is still up and running in a foreign country. Somewhere between Rome and Reggio Calabria you go through a time warp.

  ‘Think what you like,’ the boy beside me says, ‘I don’t care.’

  He’s tall and handsome in a languid southern way, his lithe body spreading over the seat like liquid copper, legs apart, left elbow pushing mine off our shared armrest, right hand scratching idly behind his neck. The phone is tucked, no hands, under his chin where he talks into it, as if savouring his armpit.

  ‘But that’s my business,’ he says calmly, ‘not yours.’

  His seat is beside the door where three friends now appear, two girls and a boy all like himself in their late teens, early twenties. They want him to move into the next compartment where there is a spare seat. Without explaining anything into the phone, he covers the receiver, sighs, shakes his head. ‘I have to speak,’ he tells them.

  Five of the six places are occupied and I’m the only one not on the phone. The girl to my left is peppy and pleased with herself.

  ‘Did something crazy!’ she says. She has sunglasses hitched up on a fraying perm. She says with a giggle, ‘That’s the million-dollar question.’

  The man opposite is overweight and in his fifties, round bald head, glistening with sweat, his red skin meaty against his damp white shirt. The Rome metro and the buses are both on strike this morning. Perhaps like me he walked to the station. It’s hot out there. It’s hot in here, too. They haven’t hooked up the air conditioning yet; still five minutes before the Roma–Palermo Intercity is due to depart.

  ‘So Mass is at seven?’ the meaty man asks. He has a copy of the financial paper Il Sole 24 Ore, plus a black attaché case. As he speaks he seems openly curious about the fact that I’m typing rapidly on my laptop. Italians often seem surprised by people who type with more than two fingers.

  ‘No, the monsignore!’ he breaks into a laugh and I see he only has one front tooth up top. Oddly, he keeps his eye on me throughout the conversation, as if he wanted me to join in the laughter, as if there were some complicity between us. Is he a priest? Does some subtle intuition tell him that my father was a clergyman? Perhaps he’s one of the Vatican bankers, very much in the news these days, for corrupt practices. But then surely he would have kept his teeth in better shape, he would have arrived at the station in an air-conditioned limousine. He wears his watch face, I see, on the inside of his wrist, something I’ve always found odd, secretive.

  ‘You don’t know how much money I spent,’ the girl on my left says triumphantly.

  ‘It’s my decision and I’ve made it,’ the boy says quietly. At first I imagined he was speaking to his mother, since I’ve noticed that many young Italians feel that phoning one’s mother is the natural thing to do when boarding a train. Perhaps Trenitalia makes them think of Mamma. But now I see of course he is firing his girlfriend, he is telling her he wants no more discussion about their break-up. ‘Still harping on about that?’ he asks coolly, as if he’d imagined she were smarter. Totally relaxed, it seems he was born to have the kind of conversations that have always terrified me. For a while he studies his left hand, turning it this way and that, as he listens to her lament.

  Only the fifth occupant, a middle-aged, well-dressed woman, sitting opposite the young man and beside the one-toothed banker priest, seems rather anxious. She has spoken to someone informing him or her that she made it to the train, that she is now sitting in a sweltering compartment, that she should be home, all things being well, at about 9 p.m., though she doubts that all things will be well, knowing these trains, that she would be grateful, yes, if she could be picked up at the station, that she has never been more disgusted by Rome than on this awful trip, that she has never been treated worse in her entire life, that she sincerely doubts she will be coming back, but yes, she knows she’s said that before. ‘Yes, yes, I’m sorry. I won’t go on.’

  She hangs up and takes two magazines from her bag. Dipiù and Zero. Dipiù is gossip. The cover shows the naked torso of a grinning, unshaven young man, as if he were surprised to find himself so handsome. The chain around his neck has a ring on it, and a glamorous woman has been placed in obvious montage beside him. ‘MY GRANDSON IN LOVE WITH EMMA,’ says the headline. ‘ACTOR’S GRANDFATHER SPEAKS OUT.’ Looking at the picture as the woman opens the magazine with a frown, I have the impression there’s something odd about it, but can’t decide what.

  ‘Do what you like,’ the young man says. His knee is jerking gently. ‘It’s really not my problem.’

  ‘I just have to dance,’ the girl by the window says. ‘That’s the truth. What can I do?’

  The meaty man has a ring of white hair above his ears and more sprouting out of his shirt, but none on his head. Reading upside down, on the papers he’s now studying, I decipher the letterhead: ‘Reverendo Monsignor Don Andrea la Regine’.

  Dipiù magazine carries a feature ‘Il Mammone più bello’ – Best-Looking Mummy’s Boy. Under a postage-stamp photo of a young man with a light blond beard is the subheading ‘Why I Can’t Find a Woman by Myself’.

  ‘Think what you like,’ the young man beside me purrs.

  The train lurches into movement, just a few minutes late. I had been meaning to do some work on the trip. There are eleven and a half hours to get through, after all. But suddenly I just feel too happy. How lucky I am to be in a compartment again! How privileged to be surrounded by all this life and to be able to understand what everyone is saying, too. People speak so much about the mutual incomprehensibility of Italy’s dialects, but I can understand all five of these people, the boy clearly Sicilian, the girl to my left from Piacenza maybe, around there; she has those vowel sounds. The woman in the corner is also Sicilian. The man clearly Roman. All have their accents but all are understandable – all, like it or not, Professor Gilmour, very Italian.

  And the train, no doubt, the train compartment in particular, has contributed to this slow unification of the language. More often than not it’s been on the train that I first heard new accents. I remember in particular the shock of hearing a group of kids from Bergamo. I honestly thought the language was not Indo-European. It was on the trains and buses with the fans of my local football team, the brigate gialloblù, that I finally learned the finer points of Veronese dialect. No doubt millions of Italians have had the same experience: trapped in train compartments with people from other parts of Italy, they set to work to understand each other.

  I close my eyes and soak it up, as if this morning I were getting an unexpected pay-off for my thirty years in this country. I’m not above a little sentimentality from time to time. The girl is now complaining that she slept only an hour and a half, between five and six thirty. ‘He gave me a really shitty bed. You wouldn’t believe it.’ In the distance I can hear a hawker shouting his wares at the top of his nasal voice:

  ‘Aranciata, coca, birra, panini, acqua, acqua, acqua, panini!’

  ‘Still on about the same old stuff,’ the boy says. He’s shaking his head.

  ‘Caffè, acqua, panini!’

  ‘I told you the truth, you know.’

  ‘Coca-Cola, caffè, acqua, birra.’

  The voice is getting closer, the speaker rearranging his five or six wares in every possible sequence, always with the same mad urgency. ‘Panini, acqua, acqua, birra, caffè.’

  ‘I didn’t do anything! It was a joke.’

  A hand taps mine and I open my eyes. It’s a young Gypsy woman placing a printed card on my lap. She has a stack of them and goes out and along the corridor to deliver the rest. In a few minutes she’ll be back to see if any of us are willing to give. ‘I’m a poor woman from Bosnia,’ the card begins, ‘homeless, with two young children …’ It runs on for a few lines. Th
e type is properly justified and there are no spelling or grammar mistakes. Presumably all the Gypsy women in a given group use the same printed card; otherwise it would push up costs.

  ‘That’s the third this morning,’ the woman reading about celebrities remarks.

  The man who corresponds with the monsignor shakes his head, then pulls out a crumpled white handkerchief to mop up the sweat. I love a man who has a real cloth handkerchief.

  ‘Vabbè,’ the boy says lifelessly. ‘OK. OK. OK.’

  Apparently the call is over because he suddenly pulls the phone from the crook of his neck and looks at it, turning it over in his hands a few times, as a man who has just used a revolver might examine the smoking barrel. Settling even more deeply in his seat, he starts to hum. I recognise the tune. What is it? Ah! ‘New York, New York’.

  ‘You old fraud!’ comes a booming voice. Two ticket inspectors are standing outside the compartment, laughing and joking. They are both men, in their fifties, pulling each other’s legs in strong southern accents.

  ‘Coca, caffè, panini, panini!’

  The vendor appears, banging two refrigerated boxes against his hairy legs. He’s wearing a white vest and capacious shorts under a proud paunch and grinning.

  ‘Un abusivo,’ the possible priest remarks, trying to draw me into a conversation. By which he means this is not the official FS vendor with his proper minibar and wad of carefully distributed receipts. All the same, the abusivo exchanges smiles and words with the inspectors and calls them by name. Leaning into the compartment, he has just begun to shout, ‘Aranciate, coca, birra,’ when he sees me.