by Tim Parks
No sooner was I in my hotel room than I got online and looked for the history of that tunnel. It was completed in 1896. The engineer ‘supposedly’ killed himself, not because he feared he had got his calculations wrong but because he was convinced his Sicilian workers had not carried out his instructions to the letter; in fact, he was English. This put the whole matter in a rather different light.
‘SO, WHAT ARE YOU doing here, Professor Parks?’
That evening, after swimming and sightseeing, I was invited to dinner on a terrace out in the country. Giuseppe, my hotelier, a man my age, and his wife, Concetta, always ate on Sunday, they said, with the same group of four or five friends. It was a routine that couldn’t be broken. Would I join them? ‘So long as I don’t have to eat meat,’ I said. For another thing that has changed since I wrote the first part of this book is that I have become a vegetarian, though I don’t actually like to use the V-word. People think you are preaching. To say you don’t eat this or that merely makes you picky, which I feel is preferable. In any event, as we got together around the table there was some consternation about this refusal of mine to eat flesh. Sicilians are not used to it. ‘Consider it a mystery,’ I said. ‘Sicily is full of mysteries. The railways are full of mysteries. Let’s not try to explain it.’
The air was warm over hills and dunes. We were near the sea. The walls were giving back the day’s heat. There were bats and bougainvillea and June bugs and crickets. Smells, too, of plants and grasses I did not know.
‘The railways, you said?’
They wanted to know why I had come to Modica, and above all, why having come I planned to be here so briefly. Giuseppe had told them I was leaving the next morning, shortly after eight. By train! From Modica station! Two of the six other people present weren’t aware that there was a functioning station in Modica. Where was it?
‘It’s not a book about Italy seen from train windows,’ I corrected. ‘Not a travel book. And it’s not a book about trains as such.’
‘What, then?’
I realised it might have been easier to explain my vegetarianism. ‘Well, I’m of the opinion that a culture, a system of’ – I hesitated – ’communication, if you like’ – they were looking at me with the wry scepticism with which one does look at foreign professors – ’manifests itself entirely in anything the people of that culture do. Right?’
They smiled indulgently. I was their guest, after all.
‘Like this routine Sunday dinner of yours, every week, the same friends on the warm terrace, the things you prepare, the way it’s served, the things you talk about, even the way you invite and tolerate a foreign professore like me. All Italy could be teased out from this if we examined it carefully, the clothes you are wearing, the way you’ve laid the table, the pleasure taken cooking, the wine glasses.’
Now one of the men, who held a half-smoked but extinguished cigar between his lips, raised a quizzical eyebrow. A car roared down the narrow lane beyond the small garden, accelerating and decelerating fiercely as it approached the bend.
‘The way people drive.’
Giuseppe laughed. ‘So?’
‘So if you’re stupid enough to want to write about a country, a people, the problem is where to start. You could start anywhere, because everything they do manifests that spirit. I don’t know,’ I cast about, ‘le strisce, for example.’
The strisce are zebra crossings.
‘What about le strisce?’
‘In England when you want to cross at the strisce you approach and stand on the pavement beside them and the cars will stop. Guaranteed. By law they have to stop, and they will. If you just stand by the strisce in Milan, and I don’t suppose it’s too different here, the cars will just keep driving by. Here you have to step onto the strisce and start to walk, and only then will the car stop, right?, maybe braking hard and cursing you. You need to be courageous.’
Heads were nodding now. They agreed on this one. Concetta complained what a disgrace it was. The strisce might as well not be there at all, since she always waited until there was a big space in the traffic before taking the risk.
‘And in a way that says everything about laws and rights in Italy. They exist, you have your rights, but you have to fight to have them; otherwise, people just ignore you. It’s the same when you want an appointment for a medical test. If you don’t shout and scream, they’ll make you wait until it’s far too late.’
‘You don’t want to write a whole book about le strisce!’
‘No. But you don’t want to write generally about a whole country either, because there’s so much, and the secret is always in the details, and the way one detail calls to another in a kind of tangle, I mean, the way a woman moves on the beach might connect with the way she genuflects in church. That sort of thing.’
There were sighs around the table. Somebody started to fill the wine glasses. But it was their fault; they had asked me why I was there.
‘OK, let’s just say I’m writing about the way trains sort of happen in Italy. You know?’
It wasn’t clear they did.
‘Or don’t happen,’ I added, laughing a little nervously.
They smiled generously, forgivingly, eating prosciutto and melon. I had slices of mozzarella. The wine was a strong local red poured from a label-less bottle.
There was a moment’s silence. Eventually one of the ladies present announced gravely, ‘I never travel by train.’
‘Nor do I,’ said another.
They were telling me I had chosen a bad subject, I was writing about something that Sicilians couldn’t connect with. Giuseppe said he frequently collected hotel guests from the bus stop where he’d come for me, or alternatively he advised them where to hire a car on arrival at the airport. They never arrived by train.
‘Never,’ he repeated. ‘Not once.’
A woman said she went to Rome and Milan regularly for business. She used cheap flights on Wind Jet. Was I aware that Sicily was the home of Italy’s first low-cost airline? That was an interesting subject.
Her companion remarked that Wind Jet was run by Antonino Pulvirenti, who also owned the Catania football club and the whole Forté empire. The ferry companies and some of the bus companies also were owned by powerful figures who had every interest in the slow death of Sicilian railways.
‘So perhaps the interesting thing is that they bother keeping the railways open at all,’ I suggested, ‘if hardly anyone uses them.’
Giuseppe agreed: ‘The state likes to pretend it’s present when it isn’t. They like to behave as if Sicily were like the rest of Italy and everything were under control. It isn’t. And, of course, through the railways they can hand out a few jobs, which wins them votes.’
I asked them what they thought about the idea of a three-mile bridge over the Strait of Messina to link Sicily directly to the mainland. This is a grandiose project dear to Berlusconi when he was in office; he always loved to pull it out when he wanted to appear as a man of vision, a man who gets important things done. ‘It’s not unfeasible,’ I said. ‘There are any number of far longer bridges in the world. Why leave Sicily without a bridge? If the bridge carried trains as well it would revolutionise travel here.’
My hosts smiled as one does when humouring a child. It wasn’t a question, they said, of being for or against the bridge – who wouldn’t want such a thing? – as of simply knowing that no bridge would ever happen. It wouldn’t be allowed to happen.
‘They’re digging endless tunnels under the Alps,’ I objected, ‘at vast expense, not to mention all the viaducts they built for the high-speed Milan–Rome line.’
‘Precisely. Milan–Rome, Turin–Lyons; not Palermo, not Sicily.’
‘Sicily is abandoned!’
There; someone had said it.
‘So where is il professore Parks headed for tomorrow,’ someone wanted to pin me down, ‘so early in the morning?’
‘Crotone.’
There was a sharp, general intake of breath. Crot
one is on the Calabrian coast, but not on the Sicilian side, the toe, but over towards the Gulf of Taranto, which begins the instep of the famous Italian boot.
‘But why? Why not Reggio? Why not Catanzaro? They’re near enough.’
Because I’d been to Reggio twice before. Because I didn’t have enough time to go everywhere, and because the ten-hour, twenty-minute journey with three train changes, a ferry and a bus link should push the efficiency of the rail service to the limit.
‘Ten and a half hours to go two hundred and fifty miles,’ one of the ladies said with a laugh.
‘Two hundred and eighty,’ I corrected.
Then in determined chorus all these good Sicilians told me there was no way; there was no way at all that the Ferrovie dello Stato could get me to Crotone in a single day. It was unthinkable. It wasn’t a major route. I was crossing Calabria, where everybody else was just going up or down the coast. Calabria was even less efficient than Sicily. They were very clear about this. Much less efficient. The famous Internet that I put so much faith in might say I could get to Crotone, but out of friendship they had to warn me that this was fantasy. I’d end up sleeping in a station, getting mugged or something worse.
‘Let’s make a bet,’ I said. ‘I will prove you wrong.’
Chapter 6
CROTONE–TARANTO–LECCE
DESPITE MY CONFIDENCE over dinner, I have to confess that it was with some genuine trepidation that I began my trip to Crotone. The only news I had of the place was negative. The abandoned chemical works north of the town was supposedly one of the great eyesores of the south. It was also famous, infamous, for one of the worst scandals of toxic waste dumping, 350,000 tons of zinc, lead, arsenic, mercury and the like. On the other hand, Crotone, I knew, had also been one of the great centres of Magna Grecia. Some 2,700 years ago, driven by local conflicts and shortages, the desire for adventure, ambition and no doubt greed, small groups of men and women set out from the various Greek cities to form a string of colonies on the Italian coasts of Calabria and Puglia. Fighting among themselves, dominating the indigenous peoples, thriving on trade, exporting grain and all kinds of artisan work and sculptures back to their communities of origin, these colonies eventually grew so large and wealthy, so cultured and accomplished, as to think of themselves as greater than Greece itself, hence the term that they themselves seem to have coined of Magna Grecia. Crotone in particular, twenty times winners of the Olympic Games in the fourth and fifth centuries BC, second only in that regard to Sparta, had been home to a huge temple to Hera built on a promontory reaching eastwards back across the sea to Hellas, their home. It is curious, with all the admiration heaped on ancient Greece in our schools and universities, that so little mention is made of Magna Grecia; and it was going to be fascinating, I thought, to see how the remnants of that old glory squared with the rare and ugly news that leaks out of the place today.
After first begging me to extend my stay in Modica, with an intensity that had me wondering if there might not be an attempted kidnap, Giuseppe, my hotelier, then insisted on having an early breakfast with me and driving me down to the station at the bottom of the town. When we arrived, he showed an almost childish eagerness to come in and explore the ticket office and the platform, as if this were some kind of oversized toy. The ticket window, a lattice of wood and frosted glass dating back to the fifties by the looks of it, was no longer in operation, having been replaced, as everywhere else, by a smart, new, credit-cards-only machine. Beside this was one of those weighing scales they used to put in stations before people could afford bathroom scales at home. I challenged Giuseppe to think of something less useful in a provincial railway ticket office, but he rightly pointed out that it did once have a use: there was a yardstick on the side of the machine that allowed you to measure your height. The state had used the railways to encourage people to check their weight in relation to their height. Were they malnourished? Were they obese? It was part of a public health drive that had started with the Fascists. In much the same way, since about 2010, each station all over Italy has a fancy waste disposal unit made up of a steel stand and three bins – one green, one yellow, one white – for organic, plastic and paper, to get people used to la raccolta differenziata – waste separation – a concept they have been struggling to get their minds around in Naples. The railways are clearly far more than a transport company; they are part of a process of belonging and the pressure to conform that goes with all community.
Out on the only platform, a nice old clock had a piece of white paper taped to its face bearing the word GUASTO in large computer-printed letters. broken. The station clock is largely irrelevant now, but when the railways began, time was not synchronised among the various Italian towns, each one deciding for itself, according to the rising and setting of the sun, what time it was. The introduction of the train and the consequent need for timetables across the territory led to synchronisation, with a decision made in 1866 that all cities would set their clocks to the time in Rome, this at a moment when Rome was not yet part of the kingdom, let alone the capital. In this regard it was a message the newly united Italy sent to the Pope, who still claimed the right to be temporal ruler of the city, that actually Rome’s time was Italy’s and the two states must soon be one.
Aside from the weighing machine and the broken clock, this tiny station at pretty well the southernmost point of Sicily looked exactly like any small station on the northern border with Switzerland. There were the same blue signs and warnings you find in all the stations, all brand new, all with the same typeface. Vietato l’accesso carried the same fines here as it did at Porta Vescovo. There were the same ugly metal window fittings, the same yellow line painted on the platform, with the notice declaring, Non oltrepassare la linea gialla, and in English, Do not go beyond the yellow line. In this sense the Ferrovie dello Stato do indeed unite the country, tying it up in a web whose nodal points must feel the same from Brunico in the South Tyrol all the way down to the toe of Calabria. It was both reassuring and disappointing.
A train appeared around the bend. In truth it was only ten minutes late, though it looked like it had come from another age, a single diesel-driven carriage at least forty years old. The line hasn’t been electrified. On board there was a powerful smell of diesel, and a rattling air conditioner that just about managed to keep the temperature bearable. The seats were fairly recent, but everything else had been left as it was. At the end of the carriage a tiny section of eight seats behind a glass screen bore the announcement Prima Classe. It was hard to see in what way it was different from second. On the driver’s door, the typeface for the warning VIETATO L’INGRESSO was straight out of the sixties and, instead of being first, ahead of the French and German, as it always is today, the English translation was last, reminding you that in those days English was not yet everyone’s second tongue. NO ADMITTANCE, it said, instead of today’s NO ENTRY. No admittance. The old-fashioned formula and the antique typeface put me in an excellent mood. There are certain train environments that immediately give me the feeling that I am protected, at least for the duration of the journey. I am almost back in my childhood. Nothing can go wrong. Perhaps because this place isn’t really part of the modern world.
FROM MODICA THE TRAIN made a generous detour to the south, to Scicli, before turning east along the coast. The ticket inspector spent most of the time ensconced in the cabin with the driver. At each station he emerged, nondescript, in his forties, looked up and down the empty platform, then waved his green flag for the driver, a whole two yards away, to close the doors. Two men and a vehicle from the 1960s to transport half a dozen people forty-five miles in an hour and a half. When eventually he decided to confront me and I showed him the piece of paper with my Internet ticket, which Giuseppe had kindly printed out on the hotel computer, he suddenly grew alert. He looked at it as one finally faced with something he has been warned about but thankfully has so far been spared. He stared at it for a while, then asked me to wait a minute and took it
away to show to the driver. Ten minutes later he was back; he frowned, handed over the paper and made no comment.
The landscape is flat and fertile here in the south-eastern corner of Sicily: olive groves, bamboo, kiwis; long grey greenhouses, some in use, some abandoned. Here and there the earth was deeply scored by dry streams – torrenti, as the Italians say. I read on my Kindle and photographed obsolete bric-a-brac on the stations. On one platform there was an antique lamp post combined with some sort of pumping device, deeply rusted but somehow dignified and elegant, certainly worth many a modern sculpture. Cactuses of the variety you see in spaghetti westerns lined the rails, and there were glimpses of the sea across the plain as we cut the corner of the island, turning north. On the wall in a station called Avola somebody had scrawled, Tanto il resto cambia (After all, everything else changes). The central platform here was so narrow that the two yellow lines to distance you from the platform edges left no standing room between.
A large woman now boarded the train, a woman of a kind you don’t see up north. She was very brown and very tubby, in her mid-fifties perhaps, but glamorous. Her white hair had been dyed blonde and was pinned up with a bright red comb. Her ample dress was a flowery print of green, turquoise and white, all very bright. On her face she wore large, very modern, almost brash sunglasses, and from her ears dangled the heaviest of earrings, threads of silver holding large red drops of stone. No sooner had she sat down than she produced a black fan with gold trimmings and very slowly, very methodically, as if this was a serious job, began to fan herself.
Although she was sitting across the aisle from me, her presence immediately imposed itself. My set of four seats was empty; so was hers. Trains give you this chance to feel another’s presence. She fanned herself and watched me reading. When the train turned a bend and the hot sunshine fell on her shoulder, she promptly shifted across the aisle to my set of seats. I looked up. She smiled deep into my eyes, raising black eyebrows, incongruous against the blonde hair, as if giving me the opportunity to say what had to be said. Her cheeks were dark, and some make-up had been used to hide the pores.