Italian Ways

by Tim Parks

  Standing on platforms in Brindisi, Lecce, Taranto, observing a few of these scenes, I suddenly felt that it was a disgrace that in thirty years in Italy I had spent so little time in the south. And I felt it was a conspiracy of the north that had held me back. But also the testimony of those very children, so often my students, who when they arrive in Milan shrug their shoulders and tell you that you really don’t need to make that journey, there is nothing there, in the south. This is my future, they tell you. The north. Yet of course many must go back. Or where would those mothers and fathers on the platforms come from? Perhaps they lose their enthusiasm for the north after they have graduated from my care. Perhaps Milan and Turin wear them down, or they find a state job in teaching and have themselves transferred to some school near home. They say you can live well on a state income in the south.

  WHAT THEY DIDN’T TELL me in particular about the south was how remarkable these old city centres are. I don’t mean architecturally, or not only. There are remarkable city centres architecturally all over Italy. But socially, anthropologically. In Taranto and Bari there are large medieval towns just a stone’s throw from the train station, still mostly ungentrified, populated by a working class, almost an underclass, that speaks its own incomprehensible dialect and enjoys a sense of community and intense collective identity lost in most of Europe. Walk down a short road lined with palm trees from the station in Taranto, cross the swing bridge that divides the so-called Little Sea, to the left, from the Gulf of Taranto to the right, and you are already in an extraordinary world of suffocatingly narrow streets and people who don’t seem to make much distinction between being inside or outside, sitting on kitchen chairs in alleys watching their own TVs through the window in rooms whose walls are rough, bare stones piled up centuries ago. Men and women call to each other along the streets with distinctive cries, coded whistles, a fluid repertoire of gestures. At once you are on the alert; you sense this is not your place; you really are a stranger here, a stranger under observation through the cracks between shutters. Taking a photo, you take care not to offend, not to intrude, hopefully not to be seen.

  The proximity of the train hasn’t changed this, or hasn’t destroyed it. True, the train sucks away the sons of these families, too, not to my university classes in Milan maybe, but to the factories of Frankfurt, Cologne and Dortmund. Instead of taking money from home to study, they send money back home. These are the kind of migrants who return on retirement; who in a sense never left and never wanted to leave.

  Another kind of train that regularly leaves Taranto, though never announced in the station, is the freight train from ILVA, the huge steelworks on the coast of the Little Sea, a large internal lagoon in full view of the city. Built in 1961 when the steel industry was under state control, its location absolutely a matter of politics rather than any commercial logic, an attempt to bring work to the south and secure the votes of a grateful community, ILVA is now reputedly the largest steelworks in Europe and certainly by far the largest in Italy. I watched trains carrying huge black steel tubes, three to a wagon, bound who knows where. But only days after my visit, magistrates served an order to close the plant down, with a criminal charge of disastro ecologico. The pollution blowing across the Little Sea into Taranto is all too visible. A study claims that the steel industry here has been responsible over the past seven years for 11,550 deaths from respiratory conditions and heart disease. It’s not clear yet whether the plant really will close. One suspects not. One might as well say goodbye to half the Italian steel industry. In any event, it’s likely that in the near future the trains will be taking more and more men and less and less steel northwards to Germany. There will be more tearful farewells on the platforms.

  IN GENERAL BRINDISI WAS a wonderful surprise, a busy port town with ferries to Greece and Croatia, not otherwise on anyone’s tourist itinerary, but undeservedly so; the centre is elegant and well signposted, while my hotel actually honoured me with a proper receipt. As so often, an easy, well-signposted movement between station and town is an indication that the local authorities are paying attention. One thing they’ve chosen to overlook in Brindisi, though, is the kind of inscription that has been scrubbed away in most Italian towns; on a grandiose monumental fountain looking north across the water of the town’s harbour you can read

  ANNO DOMINI MCMXL/ XVIII AB ITALIA PER FASCES

  RENOVATA/ VICTORIO EMMANUELE REGE ET

  IMPERATORE/ BENITO MUSSOLINI DVCE/ PROVINCIA

  F. F. (Feliciter Fecit)

  In the year of Our Lord 1940, eighteen years after the revival of Italy by Fascism under Victor Emmanuel III, King and Emperor, and Benito Mussolini, Duce; gladly donated by the Province.

  BUT NOTHING IN THE warm air of Brindisi felt dangerous that evening. Finding a table just off the pavement and with a small band tuning up, I sat and ordered a beer. It is always fascinating to watch a crowd gather. A couple in their twenties sits at the table to my left; they seem morose, not unhappy with each other, just bored. Then two others join them and the conversation raises smiles. Then four more. Another table has to be brought. Someone is taking photos. They order pizzas. Now the original two are chattering away, to each other, too, glowing with happiness. I’ve noticed again and again in Italy how often couples are dependent on groups, presumably the groups they met in. No doubt this is related to that strong Italian attachment to the home town, an emotional dependency and richness that lies behind endless weekend train journeys. The couple find themselves among their old friends in the familiar piazza, and they are happy.

  The band so far is just a couple of guys in their late forties, riffing jazz on keyboards and guitar, warming up, but then they’re joined by a young woman, energetically overweight, who starts to make some serious soul sounds into the mic. Things are beginning to look promising. I order another beer.

  I had begun to notice a typical face in the south, a woman’s face, and sure enough, sitting at the table between me and the band, here was another example. The nose is the dominant feature, long, thrust forward, slim, very slightly hooked. The eyes are large and very carefully defined with make-up, the eyebrows plucked in high arches. The forehead slopes back at quite a marked angle, accentuating the nose, and the thick raven hair, which is firmly gathered and swept back, is held tense and tight by a headband and three long wooden skewers, poking up and out at spiky angles. The neck is tall, the lips shapely, very slightly puckered, the teeth large, protruding a little, all adding to that feeling of forward thrust and intensity. Slim, small-breasted, these women are not beautiful. They are designs on terracotta. Or, no, I’m wrong, they are fantastically beautiful. Are they? I’m not sure. It’s a type. They seem to have a wisdom about their bodies, their manners, their sly, ancient smiles. That’s what draws the eye. Anyway, the band has begun to play, a soulful jazz in the summer twilight; between the songs loud June bugs fill the silence; the drone of their noisy wings swells and fades, swells and fades beneath the chatter of forty or fifty local people enjoying an evening out in town. All this just five minutes’ walk from the station in the port of Brindisi, whence the following morning the next and last stop would be Lecce, the so-called Florence of the South.

  Chapter 7

  LECCE–OTRANTO

  OUTSIDE THE STATION at Lecce I saw these words printed on a sheet of A4 and taped, together with a phone number, on a bin: TAXI DA LECCE PER OTRANTO, €60. A shame, I thought, that there was no train to take me onward all the way to Otranto, or even Gallipoli, to the very end of the land, the tip of Italy’s stiletto heel. I had checked the FS train map, but there was nothing on offer for the forty miles south of Lecce. It was sad – I would have liked to see Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto; it had always seemed odd to me that the English Gothic novel, which one always associates with decaying battlements deep in gloomy forests and ghosts that appear between sheets of rain, should have begun on the sunbaked shores of Puglia, where surely castles would not look anything like the places we visited as childre
n. I also remembered, from my work on the Medicis in the fifteenth century, that Otranto had been the object of one of the most devastating Turkish incursions into Italian territory, one that threatened to be a bridgehead to an attack on the centre of Christendom: in August 1480 the Turks took the town, killing twelve thousand people and shipping ten thousand more back to Turkey for a life of slavery. It was one of those moments when the direction of history hangs in the balance. For Lorenzo de’ Medici, however, the threat turned out to be a godsend; his Florentine armies were being hard pressed at the time by papal troops; but now the Pope took fright, made his peace with Lorenzo, and drew Florence into a defensive pact with himself and the Kingdom of Naples. It was the kings of Naples, then in possession of Puglia, who would reinforce the castle over the coming centuries, transforming it into an impregnable bastion against the Turks. No sooner, then, did I see the name Otranto on the notice taped to the rubbish bin soliciting taxi fares than I was yearning to go there. Except that Otranto was not on the train network. Let it go, I thought. If one wants to see everything historically important in Italy one will never get home at all.

  And, of course, there was Lecce. My Regionale from Brindisi arrived in just thirty minutes, passing fields of solar panels on the way. Lecce is about seven miles from the Adriatic coast to the east and fifteen from the Ionian to the west, on the relatively flat, unspectacular plain of Italy’s narrow heel. So there are none of the dramatic hills here that make Ragusa and Modica so picturesque, nor do you have the coastline that gives Taranto and Crotone their tang and visual sweep. To compensate, Lecce’s historic centre is spectacular almost beyond belief.

  The effect is due to the fortuitous combination of a stone and a style. Pietra leccese is a calcareous rock, tough enough to build with, resistant to time and rain, but apparently very easy to sculpt and carve. The style, needless to say, is baroque, a style that thrives on an extravagance of sculpted ornamentation, a wilful excess of fuss and flourish, as if no abundance could ever be enough for the act of worship involved in building a church, for, as always in Italy, it is the churches that make the city centre what it is.

  This rock, then, and this architectural style were made for each other. The sculptors could sculpt to their heart’s delight. The facades of Lecce’s churches simply froth with cherubs and roses, laurels and angels’ wings, saints, columns, scrolls, gargoyles, the whole gamut of mythical animals. But there is something else, too. All these stony frills come not in the lava black of Catania’s baroque, or the stuccoed facades of other southern churches, but in the most delicate yellowish white, for that is the colour of pietra leccese, a colour that takes on luminous depth from its surface roughness, soaking up the light, so that the lavishly fashioned stone assumes the glow and dapple of pale yellow roses in low sunshine.

  A FEW MINUTES’ WALK from the station, one leaves ordinary urban streets behind and enters a maze, not of narrow alleys, as in Crotone or Taranto, but stately piazzas, whose odd geometry combined with the hypnotic pulse of so many baroque facades can soon have you absolutely disorientated. You give up trying to work out quite where you are and just wander into and out of one astonishing church after another, where it is never this or that single artwork that amazes, but the avalanche of it all, the candles and canvases, coloured marbles and carved pulpits, tombs, madonnas, organ pipes, banners, bas-relief, white and gold ceilings seething with saints and cherubs.

  Small towns like this will have at most a couple of railway stations. How could they need more? But it seems there is simply no end to the number of churches, major churches, that an Italian town can accommodate. Who maintains them? Who can ever keep track of what’s in them? The Duomo di Maria Santissima Assunta, the Chiesa di Sant’Irene dei Teatini, the Basilica di Santa Croce, the Chiesa del Gesù, the Basilica di San Giovanni Battista al Rosario (even their names are too much), the Chiesa di Santa Chiara, Chiesa del Carmine, Chiesa di San Matteo, Chiesa dei Santi Niccolò e Cataldo. All these major churches can be found in a restricted space of a few piazzas and sunstruck streets. There are many others. It seems that in the seventeenth century, with Lecce now part of the Kingdom of Naples, governed at the time by the Spanish Aragons, a determined attempt was made to transform the city into a centre of pious splendour; the main piazzas were turned into building sites for many decades, feeding an extensive industry of ecclesiastical supplies. At the same time, with the Turks still threatening from across the water, stout city walls were built with splendid gates, which again had the shape and feel of baroque facades. Often what older churches there were in the town were revamped to fit the new style. The result is that Lecce has a homogeneous grace that is unusual even in Italy. Only the hundred-foot-high column topped with the statue of Sant’Oronzo, the city’s patron saint who miraculously turned away the plague in 1656, jars a little, built as it was by putting two old Roman columns carved from white marble on top of each other. Somehow it just doesn’t fit.

  Alternating orange juice and espressos between the various monuments, I finally tackled the Duomo, which dominates a simply huge piazza, three of whose sides form a broad canyon of glowing yellow stone. Eager to escape the sun, I pushed through the heavy curtains at the door, wandered around the aisles a while and then, suddenly feeling I’d seen enough for one day, settled down on a hard seat to rest. I have always liked to sit and look and listen in Italian churches; they are so different from the churches my father preached in, where people came for the main services, matins and evensong, and that was it. Here in Lecce, quite apart from the tourists, there was a constant trickle of the faithful, renewing their prayers and superstitions, a constant soft muttering and shuffling of respectful feet on marble paving, in the lush loftiness of ornamented altars and countless candelabra.

  I closed my eyes. After a while, a rosary recital began. Apparently it was coming from a side chapel to my left; voices losing themselves in the hypnotic rhythms of the rosary. I listened, trying to share the experience the worshippers were presumably enjoying, until very gradually I became aware that the voice leading the prayers was … recorded.

  No! It couldn’t be. But yes, it was.

  I sat up. There was definitely that metallic ring of a fairly amateur recording. Amazingly, in all this enormous and unsparingly lavish church, they didn’t have a priest around to lead the ritual, just a flatly recorded chant:

  Ave, Maria, piena di grazia,

  il Signore è con te.

  Tu sei benedetta fra le donne,

  e benedetto è il frutto del tuo seno, Gesù.

  The electronic voice droned on, with pauses, empty of all the pathos we normally feel when the individual will submits to the collective rote. And in fact no sooner had I realised it was recorded than I couldn’t even pretend to succumb to it. Instead, I found myself comparing it with the electronic announcements in those stations whose capistazione have long been pensioned off together with all their underlings. Endlessly repeated, the voice comes from far away, or years before, made present only by wires and microchips. There is something arrogant and condescending about this: the organisation providing the transport, whether of prayers or trains, has become so powerful and so torpid it feels no need to keep a real-life presence to guide its passengers and worshippers. So it becomes distant and absurd, at which point people feel absolutely at ease when they cheat; imagining they can gain absolution with perfunctory confessions, sitting in first class without a valid travel document, and in other areas of life, avoiding taxes, ignoring the building regulations.

  Sitting on my chair, in the cool of the cathedral, following the unmanned stations of the cross, pursuing analogies between church and railway, with the column dedicated to Lecce’s patron saint, Sant’Oronzo, fresh in my memory, I was reminded of an article I’d recently read that went something like this: ‘The Ferrovie dello Stato are in dire need of a patron saint in these hard times and hence will be happy to hear that the Pope has canonised Paolo Pio Perazzo, a railwayman who died in 1911 after a lifetime’s abn
egation; Paolo could have married and instead he dedicated his energies to the development of the railway workers’ union, giving away his meagre salary to the poor boys selling matches outside the train stations of the south.’

  I had thought until I read this article that St Christopher would be the patron saint of railwaymen, though I had also discovered that in Catanzaro the local Trenitalia employees celebrate Sant’Antonio of Padua. On 22 August 1943, three years after the inauguration of that fountain in Brindisi celebrating Fascism’s renewal of Italy, Allied bombers destroyed a complex of railway workshops and depots outside the station of Catanzaro Lido. With no time to take cover, the workers jumped over a low wall and dived into an orchard, but not before someone had cried for help to a small statue of Sant’Antonio standing in the yard of the depot. Up to that point, it seems, this statue had been a bone of contention between Christian workers and Communists, leading to all kinds of quarrels. However, the railwaymen survived, and when they got to their feet they found that the whole industrial complex behind them had been flattened but for that statue of Sant’Antonio. Seventy years on, the day is still celebrated, and the same statue, now housed in the railwaymen’s social club, enjoys an annual tour of the station and even a ride in a locomotive. The miracle – for what else could it have been? – was instrumental, apparently, in the conversion of a number of Communists.