Off the Rails

by Beppe Severgnini

  While their Italian parents and grandparents worry about their pensions, the new Italian Australians seem well-disposed toward Italy, and vice versa. Loretta Baldassar, an anthropologist at the University of Western Australia and the author of a history of Veneto migrants to Australia (From Paesani to Global Italians, 2005), tells me about it (in English): “The prejudices associated with the first immigrants (dark, dirty, unreliable) have been replaced by positive connotations. These days, Italy is viewed as a cultivated nation, sophisticated, well dressed, well nourished. Today there’s a considerable symbolic social capital in being Italian.” This view is confirmed by Maria Di Giambattista, who appears at a public conference in a black dress, with her hair up in a bun: “At school, fifty years ago, my classmates made fun of me because I ate bread that wasn’t square and that dripped olive oil. Now, in any good restaurant, that’s exactly what they’re ordering.”

  Northbridge, Perth’s old Italian neighborhood, is now full of Asian bars and parking structures, and membership in the WA Italian Club on Fitzgerald Street, founded in 1934, has declined from seven thousand to thirteen hundred. The tenor Beppe Bertinazzo and his recollections of La Scala aren’t enough to draw in the children of the children of the Italians. The club has to employ skimpies, or scantily clad barmaids, for Friday night shifts. Those skimpies are serving tonight, as well, and they shake their hips fetchingly as they move from table to table. Signora Christine Madaschi, a member of the club’s board, disapproves but is willing to tolerate.

  All the same, Italy—blurred, magical, idealized—is still there, like an island on the horizon. Everyone at the club was highly amused that I had arrived from Sydney by train. Surrounded by billiards tables and faded photographs, they talk about soccer. In English, true, but still, soccer is what they’re talking about. During the World Cup, they almost all rooted for Italy. The only time their conscience bothered them was when the Italian Azzurri played the Australian Socceroos. Then someone in the crowd pointed out that, after all, having two teams you feel passionate about was an ideal situation: “We can’t lose!”

  You can’t get any more Italian than that.

  5

  From the Atlantic to the Pacific: Last Train for Obama

  Grab your ticket and your suitcase

  Thunder’s rolling down this track

  BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN, “LAND OF HOPE AND DREAMS”

  Go West, (Not So) Young Man!

  On the Amtrak train no. 693, the Downeaster, for Portland, Maine, the horn blows incessantly. It blows when it leaves Boston’s North Station; it blows when it enters the rain-swept little stations of New Hampshire; it blows as it passes the white houses, emblems of New England. It blows as it passes through forests of pine and silver birch, for no apparent reason: maybe the train thinks it’s a ship, and it sees harbors everywhere. I’m told that this is what American trains have to do, because the level crossings are unguarded. I’m not entirely convinced. Someone’s having too much fun with these Atlantic horns.

  I like Amtrak’s trains: they’re not fast, but they get there. Shiny as bullets, low and narrow, comfortable but not too comfortable, they display the practical cleanliness of motels, where a stain isn’t considered an unforgivable sin. These are the trains of a Spartan nation, which we are preparing to cross.

  Today we’re just working our way up to the starting line: doing a test lap, like a Grand Prix race driver. We’re going from Boston, Massachusetts, to Portland, Maine—the state of lobsters, Stephen King, and Liv Tyler, an outlying eastern province, solitary and slightly anarchic. Tomorrow, we head west. Our destination: the other ocean. We’re going to cross fifteen states and—if God and the railroads are willing—we’ll arrive in Portland, Oregon. From the Atlantic to the Pacific, we’ll try to understand what’s stirring in the belly of America during the run-up to the 2012 presidential election.

  While the train sounds its horn—ignored by human beings and pets alike—I consider the fact that it’s been thirty-five years since my first trip to the United States. Summer 1977, I was twenty years old. That time, too, coast-to-coast (and back!), with five friends and a motor home rented in Pennsylvania, and reserved by means of long, anxious, staticky intercontinental phone calls. Maps from the American Automobile Association (AAA) in hand, Fleetwood Mac on the car radio, and one phone call a week to our parents, collect. This time, arriving by plane, I photographed and tweeted out the shape of the clouds over the North Atlantic (Lufthansa hot spot).

  But the yearning remains the same. The same conviction that America is an endlessly renewable mystery that bears studying: it changes continuously, and its strength lies in the way it keeps changing. This time, we’ll try to do it from a European point of view. A pair of German eyes—belonging to Karl Hoffmann—and a number of Italian eyes: mine and those of Andrea Salvadore (director), Alberto Engeli and Gianni Scimone (cameramen), and Soledad Ugolinelli (producer). In fact, during this trip we’ll produce a daily video blog and a TV program.

  We’re off to discover America, then. Columbus is taking the train this time. “Go west, young man!” suggested Horace Greeley, born in these parts (Amherst, New Hampshire), in 1811. I’m no longer a young man, but you know what? Tomorrow, I’m going west all the same.

  Portland, Maine–Boston, Massachusetts

  Portland, Maine. It’s pouring down rain. We have an appointment to meet in a diner called the Miss Portland at seven in the morning. When I ask for further details about the early meeting, they tell me that that’s when Americans eat breakfast—as if that explained anything. Rachel, in a candy pink uniform, offers us luxurious cakes—actual chocolate cakes, tall as row houses in the West Village—and tirelessly offers refills on our huge caffè lungo, as Italians call American coffee, a consolation of American dawns and a conquest of Western civilization. The diner, built in 1949, is modeled on a railroad car. The compartments are gauged to the size of human beings in that period: skinny, apparently. Nowadays a table for four will accommodate two people, or three Europeans.

  In any case, they’re right. If you’re going to start an American journey, you need an American breakfast, and for an American breakfast, you need a German appetite. My traveling companion Karl digs into butter-fried eggs yellow as chicks in the sunshine, charred bacon, toast drowning in butter. Rachel explains that many refugees from the Horn of Africa arrived here in Maine—ninety-seven percent white—because the state has adopted generous social welfare policies.

  We talk about it in the taxi on our way to the station. Our driver, Hussein, comes from Djibouti, and he doesn’t know that we’re talking about him. Even if he did, he wouldn’t care: he’s too busy fighting his way around puddles and warding off melancholy. The sky is a sheet of cellophane tipped to one side, and it spills water onto Portland, a small city by the sea, a city we’re not going to visit. Only surrealistic pictures of lobsters on the darkened neon signs on the restaurants, in the intervals between windshield wipers.

  The train for Boston pulls out at eight on the dot. Our long journey to the Pacific, coach class, begins. We board without ceremony. The Downeaster isn’t a train for tourists, not on a day like this one. There’s a slow leak above seat 16D. The Wi-Fi is working, which comes as a pleasant surprise. Two and a half hours along the Atlantic coastline: nothing much, considering the distances in this country.

  The Downeaster for Boston gradually fills up with railway humanity that looks the same everywhere you go: wheeled suitcases, loose comfortable clothing, brief smiles, something to read. Sitting next to me is an oversized young man in Bermuda shorts and flip-flops who’s playing on a smartphone and emitting small satisfied grunts. Whenever anyone asks us where we’re going, all weighed down with video cameras, computers, and notebooks, we try to tell them that we left this Portland, and we’re going to the other Portland. “That’s wonderful!” they all reply. But their eyes tell another story: “Why the hell would you go by train? Wouldn’t it be faster
if you fly?”

  Boston, Massachusetts

  From the Atlantic to the Pacific, agreed. But next time, maybe let’s go from Miami to San Diego. It keeps raining down on this America, and only the bravest young women venture out into the fall-like damp, displaying acres of thighs and optimistic flip-flops. Then we see them slip into the Starbucks on Boylston Street, where they order a bucketful of boiling hot cappuccino.

  The chilly city is almost unrecognizable from my previous visits. The distillation of a country that still hasn’t warmed up for the coming presidential election. The super PACs, freed of the rules on party financing, raise money that’s useful to their own candidate and information that’s harmful to his adversary. There’s no interview or statement from any of the candidates that hasn’t been recorded and dissected, in search of something compromising.

  We walk around asking for opinions on the presidential election, but they are not forthcoming. It’s not that the Bostonians we meet are wary of inquisitive foreigners; they just seem bored by the subject. “We really need someone to take charge . . . ,” yawns a well-dressed woman in her forties, rushing out of a building. “So much can happen between now and November. . . . A week is a long time in politics!” says a young man obviously not scared by platitudes.

  The election campaign is going to warm up, just like the spring, but for now things seem quiet, even the malicious delight of the Republicans; seeing the economy struggling and the president in difficulty, they are tempted to put the blame on Europe. At ten in the morning we show up at Mitt Romney headquarters; the candidate is at home here (he was the seventieth governor of Massachusetts). The address is 585 Commercial Street, just a stone’s throw from the Garden, where the Boston Celtics play. It’s a vaguely unsettling building, without a sign or any distinctive insignia. It’s the way I picture the tax office in Paramus, New Jersey.

  I know two interesting Italians in Boston. The first is Pier Paolo Pandolfi. They say that he’s one of three Italians most likely to get the Nobel Prize for medicine, and he doesn’t contradict me when I mention it. I like that about him. Repressed academic ambitions can be harmful, and often in the Italian university system, they have less to do with Nobel Prizes, and more to do with how to land a position for your assistant. PPP—I call him for simplicity’s sake—has an impressive CV. He runs genetic cancer research at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, one of the great teaching hospitals at Harvard Medical School. He identified the molecular mechanisms and genetic conditions governing the onset of certain kinds of tumors, and he’s trying to find a cure by using murine models (mice). Is he hopeful? “It’s now or never,” he says concisely. He explains science through a continuous sequence of soccer metaphors. (“Recruiting the best international talents for every position is possible for a major soccer team or a major American university. In Italy, unfortunately, it’s not.”) I used to think that scientist and AC Milan fan were mutually exclusive: I was misinformed.

  Pippo Crotti is thirty-three years old and he practices a different profession. He comes from Romanengo, a few miles outside Crema: a compatriot of mine. The son of the town veterinarian, he was very young when he first went to Los Angeles to study at the Actors Studio. Cirque du Soleil discovered him in a video and hired him, out of a hundred applicants. Pippo invented a character—Valentino, the exaggerated Italian—and now he tours the world with a wife from Pescara (Michela), a young son (Nicolò), and nine suitcases. For the past few weeks they’ve been here in Boston. Before that, San Diego, San Francisco, Toronto, Montreal, London, Amsterdam, and Baltimore; they’re continuing on to Washington, DC, Atlanta, Miami, New York, Philadelphia, Ottawa, and Los Angeles; then Australia, South Korea, Japan, and China.

  I ask him, What could Obama and Romney do in the Cirque du Soleil? Contortionist and trapeze artist, he replies. A political scientist couldn’t have summed it up any more concisely.

  Boston, Massachusetts–Albany, New York

  Train no. 499, the Lake Shore Limited for Albany, capital of New York State, is departing Boston’s South Station at 11:55 a.m. It’s a short train—one locomotive, four cars—where no one phones and almost no one talks. The conductor apologizes: there’s no Wi-Fi! Actually, there is (usually it’s the other way around). The bar car—white Formica tabletops and banquettes in dark blue Naugahyde—seems like a self-propelled diner: I almost expect to see Rachel, the Portland diner’s waitress, come bustling up, with her cakes and her smiles.

  We stop in Springfield at 2:17 p.m., but we don’t see any of the Simpsons. On the other hand, Gianni Lovato, Milanese, seventy years old, boards the train in Pittsfield. He knew that we’d be coming through. He introduces himself with a bottle of Campari, glasses, and orange peels, potato chips, and homemade hummus. He tells a fascinating story. He came here to upstate New York, in the seventies, attracted by the myth of Woodstock and the new America (also by the female flower children, he confesses). “Ah, what a wonderful time we had! But I didn’t dress like the others, you know. I was a plainclothes hippie,” he recalls seriously. And then, with a smile: “Let’s just say that I was an anarchist nights.”

  He never left America. For that matter, he won’t leave the restaurant car either, even though the Amtrak conductor, stiff and formal, keeps telling him: “I’m very sorry, but it’s forbidden to consume food and beverages brought from outside the train!” Gianni Lovato glances at him. “But we’re Italians!” he blurts out in English, inviting him to drink a toast. And, surprisingly, the man accepts both the explanation and the glass.

  Now Mr. Lovato has a white cat and a Twitter account. As the train passes through the station near his house, a small group of people wave a little Italian flag and a German one, too—all organized by Gianni Lovato, former plainclothes hippie.

  The Lake Shore Limited climbs past hills, forests, and rivers. A half-open window at the back of the last car allows you to watch America as it goes streaming past, getting farther and farther from the Atlantic. On board, the USA in miniature: all colors, every age, a diverse array of occupations. Factory workers and college students, silent matrons, teenagers with lots of zits and gadgets, couples embracing and watching a movie on their laptop. One young woman shows off a pair of tattooed feet and a hat with opossum ears. When I ask her why, she looks at me, startled: “Why not?”

  When the British playwright Noël Coward was touring the United States in the thirties, he had the names of the actors written on the sides of the railway cars, and the names lit up when the train passed through the stations, so that the waiting travelers could applaud. Personally, I’m satisfied with the show I’m seeing: America streaming past, rocked from side to side.

  In Albany—which to me looks like a miniature Washington, DC—we have an appointment at the New York State Assembly with Ron Canestrari, the majority leader. He’s an affable man, a professional politician, with an Italian look and an American attitude. We talk about the forthcoming election—he’s a Democrat—then he escorts me into the main hall, where the Assembly is currently in session. As soon as I walk in, the chairman welcomes me, reads out my biography, and asks for a round of applause. I’m still baffled when Assemblyman Matthew Titone approaches and says hello. “I’m openly Italian and openly gay,” he announces. When I ask him which is more demanding, he pauses. “Being openly Italian has its challenges. But it’s more difficult to be openly gay,” he concludes. Then he pinches my cheeks, smiles to the video camera, and leaves.

  Toward Cleveland, Ohio

  For the trip from Albany, New York, to Cleveland, Ohio, Amtrak has assigned us a sleeperette. Always beware of diminutives, in whatever language. Especially in the sectors of real estate and transportation.

  What is a sleeperette (or roomette, according to another school of thought)? A cubicle where you can have a good time provided you’re a Pilates instructor. All other human beings—including us—can only look on, with mystical stupor. The only place set aside for luggage is a spac
e over the door—ideal for stowaways, lovers, and any corpses you might need to hide, but not great for a heavy suitcase. The upper bunk runs on a curved, vertical rail. The first step pulls out and transforms into a toilet; the second becomes a sink. I don’t want to think what will happen tonight if someone climbs down from the upper bunk when his traveling companion forgot to lower the lid.

  Full of railway amazement, we troop off to dinner. We share a table with an agreeable veteran of the Vietnam War, who never actually made it to Vietnam. The U.S. Navy, he tells us, sent him to New Zealand instead, and he, perhaps in gratitude, has just marched fifty years later in the parade of the Vietnam Veterans of America. From Boston he’s returning home to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. As the daylight fades, he explains that we’re running along next to the Erie Canal, the waterway that extends from Albany to Buffalo, thus connecting the Hudson River, and therefore the Atlantic, and the Great Lakes.

  Poetry and geography recede into the background, however, outshone by a waiter who seems to have jumped out of a musical comedy and an esoteric menu: some dishes are on the menu but not available; others are available but not on the menu. . . . No one complains. Trains in America are a world all their own, populated by young people, old people, eccentrics, misanthropes, philanthropists, artists, and poor people (or some combination thereof). On our way back to our overnight accommodations, we run into a young man playing the trumpet, sitting between two cars, indifferent to the jolting and screeching. He’s heading for Chicago, where he’s a music teacher. “I take Amtrak and not the plane because it’s so noisy: I can practice and I don’t bother anyone,” he says, as if it were the most logical thing in the world. “I like the vibe of the train.”