Italian Ways

by Tim Parks

  MUCH OF THE RELATIONSHIP between a town and the railways depends on the location of the station. Ideally, the train should stop just short of the old city centre, damaging nothing but allowing the traveller to walk from station to centre in a few minutes. The city is plugged into the national network without its intimacy being violated. Italy has many examples of this ideal situation. Venice is perfect. You cross the causeway, step off the train and immediately you are in old Venice, which doesn’t seem to have suffered as a consequence. Palermo also is good, central without being obtrusive, elegant and sober without being pompous. The stations of Turin, Florence and Rome are all likewise right there, near the civic heart of things but without clotting any crucial veins. A typical solution for smaller towns is the cul-de-sac lined with plane trees and the sleepy station waiting at the end. Porto Vescovo, Peschiera, Desenzano and scores of other stations follow this charming model. There’s a curious analogy with the cemetery here, another departure point for a different journey also to be found, in Italy, behind a quiet wall at the end of a tree-lined culde-sac. You can book your place in advance or leave matters to chance as the fancy takes you. But if you’re not carrying a valid documento di viaggio there’s no question of getting off at the first stop to avoid the inspector’s ire. Whatever the fine is, it will have to be paid.

  Where the train can’t deliver you to within walking distance of your favourite cafe, public transport is essential. Verona’s main station is on the wrong side of two busy circular roads and a maze of interconnections for fast traffic leaving town. It’s not a happy location. But buses leave every few minutes to take you straight to the grand Roman amphitheatre in the central square. Ticket purchases are easy, and there is a strong and immediately perceptible flow between town and railway that suggests a healthy integration between individual needs and collective endeavour.

  Not so Crotone.

  ‘Do you know Crotone?’ I asked the pretty girl sitting opposite. I had seen from Google that the station was quite a way out of town.

  She did she said. She lived a few miles away.

  ‘Do you know how I can get to the centre from the station?’

  She frowned and reflected. ‘I think there’s a bus,’ she said. ‘I think you sort of walk for a while and then you find a place with buses.’

  It wasn’t encouraging.

  The older woman beside her leaned across.

  ‘Sometimes there’s a taxi.’

  Imagine!

  But I had won my bet. As the wheels squealed to a stop, I texted, ‘Caro Giuseppe, the Englishman was right! In Crotone. Only twenty minutes late. Evviva!’

  Ominously, he texted back, ‘Carissimo Tim, on arrival in Crotone any cause for celebration, however small, is welcome. Buona fortuna!’

  So much for my triumph over the Sicilians.

  The two-carriage train was onward bound to the small coastal resort of Sibari, some fifty miles north, along the Gulf of Taranto. On the platform a handful of people got off to be met by waiting relatives. The usual extracomunitari occupied the platform benches. It wasn’t clear what they could be waiting for, since this was the only train passing through here for quite a while. The station buildings are unexpectedly large, and there is an extended area of freight sidings cluttered with rusty wagons and green with weeds. This must have been a busy place when the chemical plant was still running on the coast nearby; it had been one of the largest in Italy. Now the rails were rusted against a backdrop of steep, red-brown hills with sparse grey vegetation. Inside the building, a modern ticket window carried the sign ‘This Desk is Temporarily Closed’. Anyone seeking a ticket refund was instructed to phone a call centre, which would give them an address to which they could post a written request with the original ticket attached. I suppose there are people who actually do this sort of thing, but the instructions read like an invitation to let the matter drop.

  To describe the area outside the station as a piazza would be generous. It was a deserted car park of broken asphalt serving not so much the station itself as the low industrial buildings all around. A brown bus bearing the legend Ferrovie di Calabria had a very stationary if not abandoned look to it. There was no bus stop, no timetable, no explanation, no driver. I turned to take the one taxi parked at the station exit, only to see it accelerating away with a young black woman in the back, looking very smart in white and purple.

  I began to walk towards town. To my left, against a cement wall topped with blue railings, a metal board had been mounted on an iron scaffolding, in the 1970s perhaps. The surface of the board was white and there was evidence that many years ago it might have carried useful information. At the top, what had once been a map was too drastically faded to make out anything at all, but beneath it – on the map’s legend perhaps – I did manage to read the words MUSEO, CHIESA, PALAZZO, CASTELLO, RESTI ARCHEOLOGICI. Appropriately, Crotone was referred to, in fancy letters at the top, by its ancient name, kroton. Only one tiny square of the whole twelve square feet of surface area was still coloured and vivid: the AGIP logo of Italian Petroleum, a black lion on a yellow background. Apparently, when the company had closed down its plant here, all useful relationship between town and station had been severed. I climbed a bridge over a stinking, stagnant creek on whose dark surface raw sewage was all too visible. Evening time and still thirty-four degrees. Benvenuto a Crotone. Maybe the Sicilians had been wrong about the trains, but I began to fear that they were right about Crotone.

  YET AN HOUR LATER, I was a happy boy. After walking through some dispiriting outskirts, the old centre of the town was immediately intriguing, a honeycomb of alleys climbing up and around a steep conical hill, each thread of street criss-crossed above with drying laundry and inhabited below by folks lounging on chairs outside the heavy bead curtains that kept flies from their front doors. People were eating, drinking, smoking, playing cards, reading newspapers or simply checking things on their phones. Outside one door a TV had been brought down to the street. Elsewhere a man was sharpening knives on a grindstone he turned with pedals and a chain. At the top of the hill was a castle housing a museum of Greek and Roman artefacts, closed now but definitely something to look at in the morning. There was also a public library with the bizarre name of Biblioteca A. Lucifero. Most of all, on the far side of the hill, there was a warm sea to swim in. I hurried to my hotel to dump my bag.

  I had booked into the Hotel Concordia, really the only hotel in the centre. Outside, on the wall beside a busy cafe, a stone plaque told me others had gotten here before me: George Gissing in 1897, Norman Douglas ten years later. Even before I established exactly where the entrance was, a voice boomed, ‘Benvenuto, Meester Parkus.’

  ‘Buona sera,’ I said.

  ‘You have booked with Booking dot-com.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  Not only was I recognisable as English, but apparently the only Englishman around here must be Mr Parkus.

  Watching life go by on the pavement outside his hotel, the proprietor had a paunch to show off and the air of the man who knows everything anyone could know about the square mile he lives in.

  ‘Where’s your car?’ he asked. ‘I came by train.’

  That threw him.

  ‘I treni fanno schifo,’ he announced immediately – the trains stink – and as if fearing contamination he made a strange little gesture – a tic, perhaps – as though washing his hands.

  I climbed a steep flight of stone steps, left my little backpack in the tiny room that the proprietor’s languid daughter assigned me to, and hurried out to take a swim as the sun sank behind the hills west of the town. The waterfront was a pleasant hum of cafes where mostly local beachgoers were grabbing an aperitivo before dinner. A small band was grinding out old covers, cheerfully enough. I swam a little way out to get a good view of the esplanade and rolled over on my back. The water is so calm in this part of the world that you can just float and breathe. I must say I felt immensely pleased with myself, pleased to have made it here, pleased
that my Sicilian friends were as wrong about Crotone as they had been about the trains, pleased that in general the southerners were turning out to be far less threatening than I had imagined. My adopted country was bigger than I had thought, I realised, bigger than Verona and Milan, bigger than Florence and Rome. It stretched this far. I had travelled a long way and still hadn’t left home. Feet towards the open sea, I lay still, letting my head fall back and back onto its warm cushion of water. Behind me the hills rose on either side of the town in the dull yellows and greens of thirsty vegetation interrupted here and there by outcrops of reddish rock. To the right was Cape Colonna, where the grand temple to Hera, Zeus’s wife, had been built. Perhaps my country stretched into the past, too, I thought. In this bay, right where I was swimming, in the times of Magna Grecia, there would have been scores of ships at anchor. That was how the Greeks conquered and traded, exactly as the British did two thousand and more years later, moving arms and resources great distances by sea. Now there were just a few fishing boats and the sound of the band grinding out ‘Fernando’. I sat up, splashed and trod water for a while, taking it all in. A young woman in a white dress was swaying along the promenade, two men in close attendance. Not true the trains stink, I rebuked my host. Not true at all. They brought me to a wonderful place safe and sound and bang on time.

  THE TRAINS ALSO BROUGHT Gissing and Douglas, more than a hundred years ago. Having eaten miserably, in the restaurant below the Concordia, I returned to my room, went online and downloaded Gissing’s By the Ionian Sea. He had eaten miserably, too, he said. And he, too, had found the river by the station an ‘all but stagnant and wholly pestilential stream’. I downloaded Douglas’s Old Calabria and found the same observation on the river, though Douglas felt the food had much improved since Gissing’s visit ten years before. Both authors spent most of their time in Crotone considering how a place that was once the capital of Magna Grecia and famed for its healthy climate, a city boasting twelve square miles of walled habitations and a huge temple to the goddess Hera, had become little more than a squalid fishing village. Gissing rails against a certain Archbishop Antonio Lucifero, yes, he who had given his name to the library I had noticed, who apparently had started dismantling Hera’s temple in the fifteenth century to use its stones to build his ecclesiastical palazzo. Douglas ironises, thanking Lucifero for leaving two of the forty-eight columns of the temple when he could have taken all of them.

  Here and there both authors had intriguing train anecdotes.

  This is Gissing’s comment on departing from Taranto for Metaponto, the same journey I would be taking in the opposite direction soon enough:

  Official time-bills of the month marked a train for Metaponto at 4.56 a.m., and this I decided to take, as it seemed probable that I might find a stay of some hours sufficient, and so be able to resume my journey before night. I asked the waiter to call me at a quarter to four. In the middle of the night (as it seemed to me) I was aroused by a knocking, and the waiter’s voice called to me that, if I wished to leave early for Metaponto, I had better get up at once, as the departure of the train had been changed to 4.15 – it was now half-past three. There ensued an argument, sustained, on my side, rather by the desire to stay in bed this cold morning than by any faith in the reasonableness of the railway company. There must be a mistake! The orario for the month gave 4.56, and how could the time of a train be changed without public notice? Changed it was, insisted the waiter; it had happened a few days ago, and they had only heard of it at the hotel this very morning. Angry and uncomfortable, I got my clothes on, and drove to the station, where I found that a sudden change in the time-table, without any regard for persons relying upon the official guide, was taken as a matter of course.

  Here is Douglas similarly irritated by early rather than late trains, returning to Taranto after a day trip to Grottaglie:

  A characteristic episode. I had carefully timed myself to catch the returning train to Taranto. Great was my surprise when, halfway to the station, I perceived the train swiftly approaching. I raced it, and managed to jump into a carriage just as it drew out of the station. The guard straightway demanded my ticket and a fine for entering the train without one (return tickets, for weighty reasons of ‘internal administration’, are not sold). I looked at my watch, which showed that we had left six minutes before the scheduled hour. He produced his; it coincided with my own. ‘No matter,’ he said. ‘I am not responsible for the eccentricities of the driver, who probably had some urgent private affairs to settle at Taranto. The fine must be paid.’ A fellow-passenger took a more charitable view of the case. He suggested that an inspector of the line had been travelling along with us, and that the driver, knowing this, was naturally ambitious to show how fast he could go.

  With so much that is familiar here, the one surprise is that the inspector’s watch ‘coincided’ with Douglas’s.

  But the anecdote that had me laughing myself to sleep, a train story I know I shall never be able to match, was this gem that Gissing found in a religious pamphlet distributed by an itinerant preacher in Taranto:

  A few days ago – thus, after a pious exordium, the relation began – in that part of Italy called Marca, there came into a railway station a Capuchin friar of grave, thoughtful, melancholy aspect, who besought the station-master to allow him to go without ticket by the train just starting, as he greatly desired to reach the Sanctuary of Loreto that day, and had no money to pay his fare. The official gave a contemptuous refusal, and paid no heed to the entreaties of the friar, who urged all manner of religious motives for the granting of his request. The two engines on the train (which was a very long one) seemed about to steam away – but, behold, con grande stupore di tutti, the waggons moved not at all! Presently a third engine was put on, but still all efforts to start the train proved useless. Alone of the people who viewed this inexplicable event, the friar showed no astonishment; he remarked calmly, that so long as he was refused permission to travel by it, the train would not stir. At length un ricco signore found a way out of the difficulty by purchasing the friar a third-class ticket; with a grave reproof to the station-master, the friar took his seat, and the train went its way.

  But the matter, of course, did not end here. Indignant and amazed, and wishing to be revenged upon that frataccio, the station-master telegraphed to Loreto, that in a certain carriage of a certain train was travelling a friar, whom it behoved the authorities to arrest for having hindered the departure of the said train for fifteen minutes, and also for the offence of mendicancy within a railway station. Accordingly, the Loreto police sought the offender, but, in the compartment where he had travelled, found no person; there, however, lay a letter couched in these terms: ‘He who was in this waggon under the guise of a humble friar, has now ascended into the arms of his Santissima Madre Maria. He wished to make known to the world how easy it is for him to crush the pride of unbelievers, or to reward those who respect religion.’

  Nothing more was discoverable; wherefore the learned of the Church – i dotti della chiesa – came to the conclusion that under the guise of a friar there had actually appeared ‘Nostro Signore Gesù Cristo’.

  It occurs to me I might translate this little story back into the Italian Gissing found it in and hand it out to every ticket inspector who gives me grief.

  MARK TWAIN MUST HAVE been lying, or at least tongue in cheek, when he claimed he admired the Italians more for their trains than their antiquities and art treasures; these last are so abundant and persuasive. Any visit to the archaeological museum in Crotone immediately makes nonsense of concepts of progress in human achievement, at least in the fields of art and craftsmanship. We may acquire more and more technology, but the ability to conjure ideas and visions of every kind from the most ordinary materials was as powerful thousands of years ago as it ever can be. And it’s no good Twain pretending he can’t understand it; one needs only to be human. Almost at once, as one turns the corner from entrance corridor to display rooms, there’s a tall, two
-handled vase, its elegant curves suggestively feminine, black at the slim top, and again at the narrow base, with a wide band of intense orange around the full swell of the belly. Across this field of light moves a band of graceful black warriors in battle, one falling back on his knee as another stands over him with his spear, others just behind waiting to join the fray; their helmet plumes have the nobility of horses’ manes, combed up and braided; their belts and straps, of armour and shields; the pleats of their skirts, the details of their weapons, are shown with fine orange lines cutting through the solid figures, so you realise that the whole complex image has been created with an intricate, highly stylised pattern of glazed black shapes interlocking but not quite touching on this luminous background. The orange of the vase glows against the black, with the glow of the Mediterranean sun that the men fought under; they stand out stark against it, their moment of glory stamped on the undifferentiated light of eternity. But because of those bright lines crossing their bodies they also seem part of the light, or to partake of it, as if they’d materialised out of it and were ready to break up into it, as if the whole of life were an alternation of black and orange, vivid, brief appearance in a flaming circle of light. This is the realm of Apollo, at once an aesthetic and a philosophy. Of course we’re talking violence here. We’re talking weapons and pain and death under a hot sun. The art isn’t attempting to hide that, but to transform it. Somebody might choose to deplore this glorification of struggle, but no one could deny its accomplishment and impact. You can’t not understand.

  What a rich museum they have in this provincial outpost. There are beautiful bas-relief faces, winged horses, a mermaid, a tiny rabbit, its head thrown right back so that the neck can form the spout for the cosmetic oil it held. Fine-tooth combs carved in ivory, brooches and buckles and mirrors of bronze. All of them found in the area immediately around the town, all of it fashioned by the artisans of Magna Grecia. A spearhead is engraved with the words ‘Acanthropos son of Teognide’; there are decorated axe heads, armour, model chariots, a highly stylised bronze horse, at once animal and abstract, a model ship that is also a lamp. There are votive terracotta ornaments, objects placed in temples to give punch to prayers and supplications, forerunners of the same tradition in the Catholic Church. There are winged girls in bronze, too busty and cheerful to be angels, terracotta busts, perfectly harmonious and poised, their faces serene and solemn, monstrous animal heads, belts of braided chain, rings, brooches, earrings, bracelets. Brightest of all, there is a gold laminate diadem fashioned into a circle of leaves and berries, emblem of the goddess Hera, a most lavish gift for some Olympian winner maybe.