Italian Ways

by Tim Parks

  Yet all this wonderful art and craftsmanship is held in the most unprepossessing low building in an empty square at the top of the old town, where no one passes by. As I enter – and the entrance is rather incongruously graced with the Italian and EU flags – the two staff members seem surprised to be disturbed for a ticket; no other visitor came while I was there, nor did any guard follow me about to see if I might be tampering or taking photos. The exhibits are all housed in tall glass cases with heavy black bases – practical, no doubt, but of a rigidity and brutal angularity alien to the grace and fluid movement of the art displayed. The captions and supporting panels of information, explaining how the Achaeans founded the colony of Kroton after consulting Apollo’s oracle at Delphi, how Pythagoras founded his school here in the fifth century BC, how Crotone was famous for its doctors, its artists and above all its athletes, how the grand temple of Hera was excavated and its treasures unearthed, are diligent but a little dull, too long, too lame, too dusty and academic. It’s Italy’s eternal dilemma: how to be equal to such a rich tradition on a daily basis, how to preserve beauty without becoming prisoner to the past, how not to kill it with the dullness of a school-trip atmosphere. Yet when you bend down and look closely at these lavishly fashioned earrings, these tiny bronze animals and fish whose stoppered mouths held oils for a beautiful woman’s skin, the humble cooking tripods and the glittering trophies, what strikes you is that these people really did live here all those years ago, on the southern Italian coast, and that they had style. In abundance. Then, in about 290 BC, the Romans arrived, and these indigenous people were no longer masters of their own destiny; they were drawn into something far bigger. Two large marble basins and the base of a statue announce the arrival from the north. It was hard not to think of it as a sad development. Coming out of the place, I felt an immense desire to rush down to the waterfront for another swim before my next appointment with Trenitalia. And I did.

  LIKE A VAST BEACHED sea monster, the abandoned chemical plant north of Crotone disfigures the coastline: another failed attempt to do something with the south. Because the conundrum is always this: why is it that the south finds it so difficult to turn its very real assets into tangible success? Here we have smart people, extraordinary landscapes, a beautiful coastline, beaches, seas, art treasures. So why is there so little tourism? Where are the English swarms, the German hordes who invade the coast of Spain? Instead of building hotels, they had tried to introduce a massive chemicals industry. It failed. In Taranto, just across the gulf, they had introduced what is now Italy’s largest steel plant; magistrates are trying to close it because the levels of pollution are scandalously high. In a newspaper this morning, just before boarding the train, I saw that Wind Jet, the Sicilian low-cost airline that one of my hosts was boasting about during our dinner in Modica, has stopped flying, leaving hundreds of passengers stranded. They have failed. They can’t compete. They spent too much money on all the wrong things. The trains are still running but mainly empty, costing the passenger next to nothing, costing the state a fortune. A section of line between Metaponto and Taranto, my next destination, is out of action and has been for more than a year. Damaged by landslides, which will mean another bus ride.

  Never mind, I told myself. Sit back, gaze through the smeared windows, enjoy it.

  Beaches. Bleached-white riverbeds. Mile after mile of olive groves. The Gulf of Taranto, empty sand with clear blue seas. Kiwi plants, row after endless row of them. Field after field. Broken walls. Stazione di Torre Melissa. Vineyards. Promontories with grey rock against blue sea. Stazione di Cirò. The capotreno’s whistle. An ancient tower on a low hillside. Squat, square masonry. Abandoned factories. Cactuses and scorched grass. Stazione di Crucoli. Graffiti: ‘Ti penso sempre, amore mio.’ Immigrants with cheap merchandise climbing on and off, getting stuck between swing doors. A stocky Slav on the seat behind me organising them. Get off here. Get off there. Stazione di Cariati. ‘Anna e Giulia troie’ (scrubbers). No sign of railway personnel anywhere. In English: ‘Boys 1978. Wanderers Everywhere.’

  In the seats across the aisle four children are headed for the beach with bags and towels and snorkels. It seems that Calabrian railways is offering free travel to under eighteens heading for seaside destinations on certain regional trains. Fill in a form, show an ID, get a travel card; a lot of bureaucracy to save a couple of euros.

  Stazione di Mandatoriccio Campana. An urgent bell announces the train coming the other way. Once it has gone by we can proceed on our single track. KM 173+863, says a sign. A one-carriage train, a tiny station building, a very long platform. Stazione di Calopezzati. As well as their big boards laden with trinkets, the immigrant vendors also carry backpacks with further supplies. One trusts they have some water with them. Their days must be intolerably hot. It is in the high thirties again. Stazione di Mirto Crosia. ‘Katerina ti amo.’ ‘Piccola, perdonami.’ Forgive me. Stazione di Rossano. Yellow plastic tables on the platform and men drinking wine. In this heat. ‘Domani sarà tardi per rimpiangere.’ Tomorrow it’ll be too late for regrets.

  A STOCKY MAN CLIMBS on board with his stocky wife; they are healthy and solid and sunburned. He asks why I’m taking pictures of the stations. The graffiti. I tell him. He’s Albanian, he says. He’s been in Italy fifteen years. Drives a lorry, in Taranto. There is no work now with the economic crisis. In particular there is no work for an Albanian. After fifteen years here he’s still not treated as an equal. It doesn’t bother him now. He came illegally on a rubber dinghy but managed to get his papers in the end. It’s harder these days. He was lucky. His wife nods and smiles at everything he says. They speak Italian to me and Albanian to each other. Now he wants to see my camera. It’s a cheap digital Olympus. He turns it over in hairy hands, his forearm tattooed with a blurry Cupid. He asks me what the camera’s memory is. I’ve no idea. I never enquire about such things. They have been holidaying with their son, he says. In Catanzaro. He has four sons. Ten grandchildren. Three great-grandchildren. Ah. This is what he wanted to tell me. He’s proud of his family.

  ‘Guess how old I am,’ he challenges.

  His wife is smiling complacently. I have no idea. I’m rather taken aback that he claims to have great-grandchildren. He doesn’t look that old. What’s the youngest you can be to have great-grandchildren?

  ‘I’d say you’re sixty-five.’

  ‘Fifty-seven,’ he says, grinning triumphantly.

  He’s my age! I calculate: average childbearing age between eighteen and nineteen.

  ‘My first at seventeen,’ the wife says.

  ‘Can’t stop it,’ he says with a laugh. ‘It’s life!’

  He seems blissfully happy with his lot.

  ‘People try,’ I said. ‘To stop it, I mean.’

  ‘You can’t.’ He shakes his head. ‘Fools. It’s life.’

  AT SIBARI WE SWITCH trains for the section to Metaponto; that is, we exchange one heavily scrawled, poorly air-conditioned, single-carriage diesel for another heavily scrawled, poorly air-conditioned, single-carriage diesel. The train revs and the fumes intensify. The air conditioning is just enough to stop us from losing our heads. Just. A whistle and a lurch. One is usually so worried on trains about time, or at least so conscious of it. Will we depart on time? Are we running on time? Will we arrive on time? Will I win my bet? ‘This Regionale is travelling with a delay of eleven minutes. Trenitalia apologises for the inconvenience.’ ‘This Interregionale Veloce is now approaching Verona Porta Nuova. Terminus of our journey. On time! Thank you for travelling Trenitalia.’ Time time time. But today I’ve decided to pay no attention. I shan’t think of time at all. I refuse. After all, there is only one train running north and east along the Gulf of Taranto, rattling and swaying and stinking of diesel. Our train. There are no branch lines. There are no choices among Regionale, Regionale Veloce or Intercity, no Eurostar, no Frecciarossa. There is nowhere else to go but where we are going, along the timeless Mediterranean coast.

  I have firmly decide
d I’m not going to look at my watch the whole four-hour journey. I’m on holiday, in a part of my country I have never visited. It’s hard, though. Hard not to look at your watch, hard to be here now, on each stretch of the journey, without being anxious for the end, without wanting anything to happen on the trip that you can engage with and write about. Buy your ticket each day now, I tell myself, wait for the train, climb aboard. Don’t expect company for the journey. Don’t expect to understand when there is a delay. Or even if there is a delay. Don’t ask whether the train is punctual. Don’t worry what Taranto will be like, what Lecce will be like, or Brindisi, or Bari. Don’t be concerned that you may have nothing to say about these places. Just be here, on the journey, at every moment of the journey; when the train is hurrying on and the landscape is whisked away – here and gone, here and gone – when the train stops and the same dull station name imposes itself for twenty minutes, Trebisacce, Trebisacce, Trebisacce. Learn to be happy with Trebisacce, and happy when the inspector blows his whistle; an electric warning sounds and the doors slide shut. Trebisacce slips behind at last. It’s gone. I almost miss it. Now Roseto, now Monte Giordano. Accept the names that come and go, places that will never mean anything to you – Rocca Imperiale, Policoro. You are simply here, on a journey from Crotone to Taranto, from this moment to the next, transported by Le Ferrovie dello Stato.

  I think I am learning to take the journeys less anxiously. The sun helps, and the general feeling that these railways are not part of an urgent business world, they can’t be speeded up, they just are what they are. I’m learning to take them day by day and to accept that I really did move my life to Italy thirty years ago. I’m not sure why, but this trip to the south has made me think about that decision again. Thirty years ago I surrendered my identity, my Britishness. I became this strange hybrid, neither here nor there. Between places, between cultures. Recognised everywhere as English, but not really English now. Accept that. Now you are on a journey through tiny stations whose names are all new to you – Scanzano Jonico – but as real to those who live here as any other place. They are as much a part of your adoptive country as Verona, as Milan. Look at the bamboo growing in the gulley. Look at the dry gorse, look at the ruins and broken doors and the fat mother crouching on the platform to spray deodorant onto the armpits of her infant children. You are here now, arriving in the station of Metaponto, whether on time or not on time. It doesn’t matter.

  So for a few hours my mind lapsed into this strange mood, lulled perhaps by the rhythm of wheels on rails, stifled by the poor ventilation, mesmerised by the fierce sunlight on this arid landscape.

  TARANTO, BRINDISI, LECCE, BARI. If the provincial railway lines here are little more than buses on rails, running half empty, nevertheless when a mainline Intercity arrives from the distant north, then the carriages are full, the stations are full. Summer is the time of return. Students studying in Milan, Bologna, Turin, young men and women who went north to get education and find work. Their families are waiting for them, right on the platform. Mothers and fathers are there when they tumble out of the carriage, brothers and sisters. A grandmother, a cousin. Perhaps a boyfriend or a girlfriend. The first embrace is always for Mother, smiles and joy, as the last embrace will again be for Mother when these same young people depart once more in a month’s time.

  The train station is the ideal scenario for greetings and farewells. The car is too banal. What does it mean to set off in a car? Nothing. The airport is too exhausting and impersonal, the plane itself remote, unseen, the barriers and security disturbing. Here the powerful beast of the locomotive thrusts its nose under the great arch of the station. The lines straighten from the last bend. Clanking and squealing, the train slows. The last moments of waiting begin. Eyes focus on the platform, keen to possess their loved ones; in the train corridor, meanwhile, the long-awaited beloved is jostling and jostled, luggage at his heels. The train slows, slows, slows, teasing everyone on both sides of the divide, making them wait, making them savour the tension between absence and presence. Text messages are flying back and forth: ‘The last carriage but one.’ ‘The first after the restaurant car.’ ‘You’ll have to help with my bags.’ ‘Be nice to Zia Eleonora, her dog just died.’ ‘I look a state without my make-up.’

  It’s simply agonising how long a train can take to stop in a terminal station where the macchinista high up in his cabin must gauge the distance to the buffers. The beast is inching now, steel wheel on steel rail. If this were an old Regionale, people would hang out of the windows, but the Intercity carriages are sealed – bursting with life, but silent. Then with a wonderful sigh and a last jarring squeal it has stopped, it is still. And still, the doors can’t open. Why is there such a long wait on trains, ten seconds, even twenty, almost a minute, between the locomotive stopping and the green light that tells you that you can push the button and open? All along the twelve packed carriages the buttons are pushed, and again with agonising slowness – it must be done on purpose – the heavy doors begin to inch away from the carriagework. If the whole of railway technology, the whole cultural and architectural heritage that is the Italian railway station, had been designed on purpose to maximise the emotional drama of return from afar, it could not have been done better. Now, after trips of six or eight or even ten hours, the passengers are tumbling out. Some will have to wait in the corridor while others fuss with their clumsy bags on the steep steps. Some are already striding down the platform.

  The family come to greet their firstborn son, their beautiful daughter, sees a stream of strange faces flowing towards them, a dam release of insignificant others, people who mean nothing to them, pushing past, themselves irritated by these idiots blocking the way. When will the known face declare itself? When will Luca or Chiara appear and be mine? In the meantime, other trains are arriving and departing. Coincidenza, coincidenza! Regionale per Metaponto in partenza dal binario 4, anziché binario 7. Appearance, presence, is so mysterious. Not there, not there, not there, then suddenly, yes, yes, there, there she is. Stefania! Finalmente! That’s her face, her walk, her. So different from anybody else on the planet. You have the crowd, and in the midst of it, infinitely more special, her, Lucia, my daughter, my girlfriend, my sister.

  In a space of twenty or so square yards towards the end of the platform dozens of families, lovers, mothers are sighting their object of desire. Now they must just survive the last tumultuous but strangely embarrassing seconds when the beloved is seen, recognised, but not yet close enough to speak to and embrace; all you can do is observe, watch, as they approach, and you too are observed and watched by your darling child; all this emotion is ready to pour out of you and instead there you are observing your beloved and observed by them, judging and being judged: Mario definitely looks thinner than he should. Why does Mamma always get so stupidly excited? And what an old-fashioned blouse! Then the embrace, the contact, and the southern child is back, possessed, adored, perhaps already regretting the freedoms and anonymity of Milan.

  It’s so much more intense down here, the emotions on these platforms where Trenitalia hits its southernmost buffer and releases these Mediterranean children from the prison of the train into the loving clutches of mamma e papà. The sense that one has to go north for a serious career, or at least the start of that career, increases the south’s perception of itself as forever the victim, abandoned, even punished by the callous and confident north. Poor us, poor us! And this winds up the emotions of greeting and parting; when perhaps the truth for many of these kids is that the south’s asphyxiating family traditions, its asphyxiating adoration of its offspring, is as much the trigger for departure as anything else. True, the economic situation is dire. Youth unemployment is almost 50 per cent in the south. But many of these young men and women, after being spoiled silly in the summer weeks ahead, eating heavily and scorching themselves on perfect beaches, will be only too glad to be on the train again in early September. Then the carriages will be already there, waiting on the platform, and Fathe
r will quietly carry the bags on board, find the prenotazione obbligatoria, hoist his daughter’s heavy bags full of gifts onto the luggage rack, exchange a last embrace. The son will cross the aisle to wave to his mother standing on the platform and looking up at the window. She looks small and rather pathetic down there, her tired face upturned with a mole at the corner of her mouth; and he looks scandalously healthy after his days of seaside idleness, glowing with sunshine and sleek with pasta and pastries. It’s embarrassing because no one can speak now. The windows are sealed. They can only look at each other through the greasy carriage glass. But you can’t just turn away and sit down. You have to wait until the train moves. Papà has his arm around Mamma’s shoulder and she is trying not to cry, or giving that impression. Really the boy is already gone, but, unfortunately, he isn’t gone, the train should have left but it hasn’t and Mamma is standing there on the platform and won’t go away. He smiles, wishing she would leave, and showing her the palm of his hand, waves it a little from side to side in stifled farewell. Then she really does begin to cry and his father exchanges a pained look of weary complicity until, at last, again with that heart-rending slowness that only a long train weighing hundreds of tons is capable of, the carriage begins to move, Mamma is inching away. She’s waving and trying to laugh through her tears now. The motion brings relief and he can wave back properly unembarrassed before the quiet passengers around him. Mamma is gone. Papà is gone. Taranto. Reggio Calabria, Bari, gone. It’s back to reality, adulthood, the north, greyness, Milan.