Italian Ways

by Tim Parks

  So to keep things brief, you can no longer buy five or six Interregionali tickets and a few supplements and take whatever train is most convenient, because the Intercity ticket now has the supplement built in. However, Beppe tells me, if I get an annual season ticket for the Interregionale, I will be allowed, as a very special favour for having spent so much money, to buy separate supplementi – they do still exist, then – to travel on Intercities for individual trips, if, and only if, at the moment of purchase of the supplements, I am able to show my season ticket and a valid ID (I love the expression ‘valid ID’). The ticket seller will then type into his computer (using two fingers) my name and the number (the rather long number) of my season ticket so that the journey can be moved in accounting terms from one service to another, thus making the railways more efficient. Alas, because of the need to show an ID, this special favour supplement is not available at the ticket machines. I’ll have to join the queue.

  It’s a drag, but I agree to this. I can buy half a dozen supplementi at a time, I decide, restricting my trips to the ticket window to a minimum. For €670, then, at the time about £550, Beppe gives me a ticket that looks exactly like any other Trenitalia ticket and indeed any other supplement: a piece of soft cardboard about seven inches by two and a half with a pink-and-blue-patterned background and faded computer print above. The only thing that distinguishes this ticket from the one that costs €6.82 is the word ANNUALE, which occupies approximately one hundredth of the ticket’s surface area. It’s clear I’ll have to stick a piece of coloured tape on this ticket to distinguish it from the supplementi I buy. And I’ll have to laminate it to stop it from disintegrating in my wallet.

  Beppe wanders off to make a photocopy of the ticket in case I lose it. In fact he makes two photocopies, one for me and one for the ticket office. That’s generous. They keep a file. He opens an old metal cupboard. All this takes him five minutes and more. The photocopier has to warm up. Then he starts to ask after my family and he’s expecting, of course, that I’ll ask after his. I do. I’m getting embarrassed because at 6.35 a.m. the queue behind me is long and there is a mill of worried people around the FastTicket window. The train of the living dead has been announced as ‘in partenza’, about to depart. His son is doing very well at school, Beppe is explaining. I know that if I protested that we shouldn’t be exchanging pleasantries in these circumstances, with other people waiting, he would imagine that I didn’t want to talk to him. His daughter less so, he says, unfortunately. She doesn’t seem to take her teachers seriously. Beppe would never really understand that I was worried about the others in the ticket queue. Why should I be? Personal relationships come before civic sense. Salutami la Rita, he calls. My wife.

  MY TICKET SAYS ‘da convalidare’ at one end. For the past ten years or so they’ve been making us insert our tickets into a little yellow stamping machine before we get on the train. The idea is that if the ticket inspector on the train doesn’t manage to check your ticket (with its two-month validity), you still won’t be able to use it again, stamped as it now is with one particular time and date: the convalida. But the ink in the stamping machines is usually so faded that, assuming the inspector doesn’t come along and punch a hole in it, I am sure you could use the same ticket twice at least. The print is illegible. Suspicious as I have learned to be, I wonder who got the contract to install and service all these little yellow stamping machines in every foyer and on every platform in the 2,260 stations in Italy and whether that cost can really be lower than the revenue previously lost to the furbi who were able to avoid the ticket inspector as he passed through the train. For nine times out of ten your ticket still gets inspected and punched, even after it has been convalidato.

  Or – since there is no end to conspiracy theory once you’ve begun – perhaps rather than guaranteeing that everybody pays for their ticket every time they travel, the idea was to open up new opportunities for fining passengers: if you don’t have your ticket stamped you’re liable to a fine – €50 or so – even if you merely forgot to have it stamped. Since there is no barrier in Italian stations between ticket purchase and platforms – nothing to remind you, that is, of your duty to have the ticket stamped – forgetfulness is understandable, especially for tourists who don’t know the ropes and perhaps are not in the habit of reading the small print on their tickets carefully.

  My mother had to pay up some years ago. She was travelling with a friend. You can imagine them: two pale English pensioners in flowery dresses on the line from Florence to Siena. They hadn’t realised they were supposed to have their tickets stamped. My evangelical mother is the least likely person in the world to try to avoid a fare. Probably this was the only time in her eighty-odd years that she has fallen foul of the law. Certainly it was the only time she ever had to pay a fine. She felt deeply shamed. The inspector was remorseless: ‘You foreigners always pretend you don’t understand,’ he said.

  But no law in Italy is ever quite watertight, let alone rigidly applied. There are always interesting loopholes. For example, if I forget to have my ticket stamped, or am unable to do so because the stamping machines are not working (an occurrence so common as to be the norm in some small stations), all I have to do is inform the ticket inspector before boarding the train and he will write the time and date on the ticket with his pen, and sign it, and I will be forgiven and allowed to travel without paying a fine. The inspector – who may or may not also be the capotreno, the train manager – can generally be found at the door to one of the carriages towards the back of the train, one foot on the platform, the other raised self-importantly on the footplate, waiting to blow his whistle and wave his green cap to tell the driver to close the doors.

  Once, riding an Intercity with my Interregionale season ticket, I realised I had forgotten to have my supplement stamped, priced at €4.23. Immediately anxious, I jumped off at the small station of Peschiera, but there was no stamping machine in sight on the platform, so, seeing the ticket inspector already raising his whistle to his lips, I ran to him and asked if he would convalidate (is this a word?) my ticket. He refused. He said he could see from my ticket that I had already been on the train and hence was liable to a fine. I pointed out that now that I had got off the train I could stay off and hence avoid a fine. He could hardly fine me if he didn’t catch me on the train and I was clearly not intending to cheat if I had jumped off the train to have my ticket stamped.

  We argued. It is extraordinary how regularly Italy creates these areas of uncertainty: how is the law to be applied? Whole personalities form around such complications. The furbo, of course, will try to get around every rule. But there is also the opposite figure, the pignolo, someone who will apply the rules most determinedly, even when, or perhaps especially when, they are the most inappropriate. The pignolo always believes that everybody else is furbo, the furbo that everybody else is pignolo.

  ‘I shall refuse to pay the fine if you try to fine me,’ I told the ticket inspector.

  ‘I will report you to the on-board police,’ he declared. There are usually two carabinieri or poliziotti, armed to the teeth, on every train.

  ‘The on-board police are on board,’ I told him. ‘And I am not.’

  Once again he refused to ‘convalidate’ my ticket.

  Meanwhile, the Venice–Turin Intercity was being held up. Perhaps a thousand passengers.

  Feeling belligerent, I got on the train anyway. ‘It’s clear that I’m in good faith,’ I declared.

  ‘The rules don’t say anything about good faith,’ he said. This is true. Italian rules and regulations never consider the question of the spirit in which one has behaved. He was going to fine me and that was that.

  But though I sat in the same carriage all the way to Milan, he never came to fine me. Perhaps it was only important to have me worried, to assert an authoritative presence. The tax office has also done this to me. They threaten, then don’t do anything. Since the inspector didn’t stop by to put the date on my ticket, I was able
to use my supplement a second time. And I did!

  A similar situation once occurred when I travelled to Gorizia, on the Italian–Slovenian border. The inspector examined my ticket with some care and told me that this ‘document’ required me to travel through Pordenone rather than through Udine. I had gone the long way round, he accused. There was a difference of some twenty miles to pay, plus a fine.

  The man at the ticket window had told me nothing about this, I protested. I just asked for a ticket to Gorizia and consulted the time-table and got on the most suitable train. I could hardly be accused of gaining anything by taking a train that travelled twenty extra miles.

  ‘Your ticket says via Pordenone,’ he told me. ‘Don’t you read your documento di viaggio?’

  I was fascinated. What kind of man is it who imagines that when one buys a train ticket one then stops to read it? Or thinks of it as a documento di viaggio?

  The train stopped in a station. ‘I’ll be back in a moment to deal with this,’ he said severely; he would have to calculate the exact excess fare and then the exact fine in relation to that exact excess. Everything in Italy is worked out on the basis of cost per kilometre, with no regard to which lines are more heavily travelled or more costly to maintain. The man hurried off in his nice green blazer with its smart shiny buttons and … never came back. With an Italian official it may be that the more he insists on a facade of correctness, the more likely it is, if you are determined, that in the end he will let you off. I suspect that this is why Italian football players always challenge the referee’s decisions. You just never know. And if the man won’t actually reverse this decision maybe he’ll think twice about blowing his whistle for the next foul.

  Anyway, the season ticket I have bought at 6.35 in the morning bears the warning: da convalidare (to be stamped). But being an annual ticket, of course, there’s no need to stamp it. In fact, it would be a mistake to do so. How could I stamp it every time I got on a train for the next year? Italy is not a country for beginners.

  ONE OF THE GREAT advantages of the 6.40 is that it departs from Verona. You don’t have to hang around on the platform or in the waiting room. Even if you’re fifteen minutes early, you can go right ahead and sit on the train. I make for the last carriage. It has a very particular smell that always affects me deeply when, after the long summer holidays, I return to the trains and another year’s teaching. It is a mix of urine and disinfectant and tired synthetic upholstery impregnated with the smoke of years ago. You can’t smoke on the trains any more, but the smell lingers. There are smudgy neon lights that offend the eyes without illuminating a book. Here and there a seat is occupied, by a student returning to college with his newly done laundry; a man in overalls constantly clearing his throat; a black girl, plump and exhausted, clearly on her way home after a long night. There is a brisk trade in prostitutes outside Verona station, immigrant girls mainly, Africans and Slavs, living on the edge of slavery, I fear. They use the trains a lot. I’m not sure why. Heads wobble and suddenly nod. The girl, the only non-white in the carriage, is wearing shiny red boots. Someone snores. It’s an open-plan carriage, no compartments, and I choose a seat as far away from the others as possible. At 6.42 or 6.43 a faint tension is transmitted through the hard seat to the loins and the thighs. No train overcomes initial inertia as gently, as reluctantly, as wearily, as the 6.40 Interregionale to Genova Piazza Principe via Milano Centrale.

  Then a late arrival bangs into the carriage and comes to sit down right next to me. Her Discman is tinkling, she wears a sickly perfume and has a jewel in her navel, and she carries a noisy paper bag with a sticky croissant. Why does this happen so often? There are people who want to be on their own, to mark out their own territory and be quiet there, and there are people who are eager to invade that territory, to sit close to someone else. There seem to be a disproportionate number of the latter in Italy. You sit in an empty compartment in a whole carriage of empty compartments, a whole train of them, and someone comes banging in and sits next to you.

  Once, during a strike, I found a completely empty Intercity at Milan station, a ghost train. Eventually, an announcement said that the train might leave in two hours’ time but this couldn’t be guaranteed. The voice apologised for any inconvenience. Having no inclination to go and find myself a hotel, I decided to sit in the train and read. I chose a carriage halfway down the long platform. Since it was an Intercity, there were compartments. Suddenly a man was tugging open the sliding door to join me, a rather sad, lanky middle-aged man in a grey raincoat with a slack, worried mouth and thick spectacles. He had a huge suitcase, the sort of suitcase that has you wondering where on earth its owner can be going and for how long. Are these all his worldly possessions? Is he a refugee?

  With some effort the man swung the suitcase up onto the luggage rack, sat down, brushed imaginary crumbs from his trousers, looked at me, smiled and began – I knew I couldn’t stop him – to talk: about the strike, about a difficult change of trains that awaited him in Venezia Mestre, about the impossibility of ever knowing what would happen in Italy even when you began the most banal of journeys. Wasn’t that so? It’s an interesting thing how often Italians like to refer to the country as if it were foreign to them, inhabited by people who are inexplicably unreliable. I barely nodded. ‘Ecco il capotreno!’ he suddenly shouted, and he jumped up and hurried out of the compartment and down the corridor to talk to a man in a smart cap walking along the platform.

  This was my chance. Furtively, I picked up my own small bag, headed the other way up the carriage, and pushed through the two connecting doors into the next. I must have walked through about four completely deserted carriages, going towards the locomotive, before choosing another compartment. Since the electricity in the train hadn’t been turned on, I was looking for a place where one of the big floodlights high up in the station outside would give enough light to read by, even through grimy windows. Here. Good. I sat down. For perhaps ten minutes I read. I was happy. The truth is, I really don’t mind sitting on an empty train for a couple of hours and reading. If a book is good enough, it doesn’t matter where you read it. There are times when I have even welcomed train delays. After perhaps fifteen minutes, with a sudden wrenching of the compartment’s sticky sliding door, breathless and anxious, the same man reappeared.

  ‘There you are!’ he cried. He sat down. He resumed his conversation. He began to tell me what the capotreno had said. The train would be leaving, but only when they found a co-driver. They were having trouble finding a co-driver. Because of the strike. As for Mestre, heaven only knows. His last train for some mountain destination departed at 8.15. ‘Who knows where I’ll be sleeping tonight?’ He seemed quite pleased with this melodramatic reflection. Then, glancing up at the luggage rack, he asked, ‘Where’s my suitcase?’

  I shook my head. ‘You left it in the other carriage.’

  ‘What other carriage?’

  The man hadn’t realised that he was now four carriages nearer to the locomotive.

  ‘Oh.’ He squinted at me. ‘I knew something was odd,’ he said. ‘But why on earth did you move?’

  ‘I want to be alone,’ I told him.

  Alarmed, he jumped up and hurried back down the train to reclaim his suitcase. For a moment it crossed my mind he might be a ghost; he haunted this train, even when it was parked for days out in empty sidings. That would explain why he was so desperate for company. Taking no chances, I moved again, this time into first class. They can’t fine you for being in first class until the train actually starts moving. I felt sure this was a second-class ghost.

  IT’S 6.50. THE LANDSCAPE slips away outside smeared windows. To the left is the pianura padana, a ribbon of low factories beside the line and beyond them long stretches of vines, orchards, maize. It’s flat and dull, foggy in winter, steamy in summer. The replacement of the old wooden vine supports with a harsh geometry of identical grey cement posts is depressing, likewise the huge expanses of protective black netting now stretched ove
r the cherry orchards. No more the white spring blossoms. This countryside has a dogged, industrial, grid-like look, as if nature had been carefully parcelled out in discrete units to make it easier to count the cash. We’re travelling across one of the wealthiest areas in Western Europe.

  But to the right of the line, the north, the land rises through the terraced hills of the Valpolicella to the mountains of Trentino. Here the vineyards have a more traditional aspect, and on a clear day white peaks are visible along the whole alpine arc. You can even make out the wolfish pine woods, far away, the grey rock faces and dark, resiny valleys. It’s good to glance up from a book and see the mountains, to imagine you can smell them. They afford an illusion of drama and, for someone who grew up in London, the assurance that I now live far from home. Then at Peschiera the train begins to fill.

  Peschiera and Desenzano, the first two stops, lie on the southern shore of Lake Garda. Peschiera is where you get off for Gardaland, the Italian version of Disneyland. The pretty provincial station with its dark maroon stucco and unkempt flower beds is marred by a series of colourful wooden facades mimicking a street in the American West inhabited by cartoon characters. Gardaland, Bus navetta gratuito! says Yogi Bear. Free shuttle bus. During the summer holidays, the train will be packed with adolescents who come here to spend their parents’ money. This morning a police car has parked on the platform, as if Paperone and Topolino, or rather Mickey Mouse and Scrooge McDuck, had really been shooting it out.