Italian Ways

by Tim Parks

  VERONA PORTA VESCOVO IS the kind of station where you hear a bell ring out before a train comes. It’s a lovely sound, urgent and old-fashioned as a black-and-white film. The platforms are very long, very narrow, and generally deserted. To get to platform four, where trains depart for Verona and very occasionally Milan, you have to walk across the lines. I love doing this. It gives a pleasant sense of transgression, of really being in the nitty-gritty.

  There are other leftovers from the past here. Above the door outside the station, a yellow sign protrudes perpendicular to the wall just above head height; it’s a long, rectangular arm holding up a large disc, which carries the image of an ancient black dial phone with white circular holes arranged in a circle around the circumference of the larger yellow disc to suggest one of those revolving dials you used to put your finger in and turn to form the number. It even has a few holes missing at the bottom right, just as those phones did, where your finger ran into the end stop. Black lettering along the yellow arm supporting the disc proclaims INTERURBANO AUTOMATICO (automatic long-distance calls). I presume this advertised the once-novel possibility of making long-distance calls without going through an operator. Ever since the mid-nineteenth century, when the laying of train lines went hand in hand with the introduction of the telegraph, railway stations have offered the most up-to-date communication services. They marked the beginning of the world perceived as network. You could send and receive messages through a grid, as it were, like lines on a map, without actually touching the ground any more, as the train passes over the landscape on its rails without ever really touching anything else. It was a more mental world, more mentally busy and fragmented than the old landscape where a physical message had to be carried on hooves or cart wheels.

  Today the young people who use Porta Vescovo station to go to school in Verona or to university in Padua wouldn’t even know what an interurbano automatico or an operator-assisted call was. They have no idea why the circle of holes is interrupted at the bottom right. They have their mobiles in their pockets, the entire world at their fingertips. But the old yellow sign, the black phone, the dial, reminds us that the yearning for easy communication has always been there, that our grandparents and great-grandparents were already far, far ahead of their grandparents. If ‘ahead’ is the right word for this growing separation between where we are and who we’re talking to.

  PORTA VESCOVO, I RECENTLY discovered, was actually Verona’s first railway station, inaugurated in 1847. At that time the country was still divided, with half a dozen more or less independent Italian states involved in a complex power game with France and Austria over who would control the peninsula. Verona was very much part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, indeed the bastion of Austrian defences of its Italian possessions, which then stretched from Trieste in the east all the way to Milan in the west. Almost at once people saw both the military potential of railways and their cultural importance to the Risorgimento movement: rapid, inexpensive travel between the different parts of Italy would surely help to unite the country. The Piedmontese, who were trying to harness Risorgimento enthusiasms to their own expansionist ambitions, were particularly active in building railways, linking Turin to Genoa and seeking to connect with Lombardy. Understandably, the Austrians were not impressed. They refused to connect the lines in their territories to other parts of Italy and built the lines between Milan and Brescia, Vicenza and Venice, Verona and Trento mainly to facilitate troop movements inside their own possessions. Eventually these lines were all linked up right here at Verona Porta Vescovo in 1854, forming one single east–west railway line across the northern margin of the Po Valley beneath the foothills of the Alps. A small siding ran out of Porta Vescovo directly into what is still the large military barracks at Camp Marzo nearby. Soldiers could spill out of their fortress in Verona to be sent off by train to whichever border of the Austro-Hungarian Empire was under threat.

  The railways certainly played their part in the Risorgimento wars. The Franco-Piedmontese victory over the Austrians at Magenta in 1859, one of the few important victories the Piedmontese achieved, came largely thanks to a recently completed rail bridge that allowed Piedmontese troops to cross the Ticino River, then the boundary with Austrian territories, rapidly and in force. A year later, Garibaldi crowned his triumphant conquest of the south by riding into Naples on a train. That same year the learned journal Politecnico remarked that Italian unity was to be completed and maintained by ‘armies and railways’.

  THIS HIGH PROFILE FOR railways wasn’t always positive. The first major corruption scandal of the newly unified Italy involved the trains: it came out that ministers had awarded lucrative railway contracts to a company in which they themselves were major shareholders. In general the attempt in the 1860s and 70s to bring the country together very quickly by building more and more railways led to shoddy workmanship and many rail companies failing when it turned out that there was little demand for the lines they had so enthusiastically laid. In 1893 the cultural magazine Nuova Antologia observed,

  the determining criteria in Italian railway construction from the unification of the Kingdom until the present day, have overwhelmingly been more political than technical and economic. Financial questions played only the smallest part. But while in the beginning those political criteria were grandiose and national, just and even necessary, later they were to become pettier and pettier, to the point that they were almost always more regional than rational.fn1

  Much of the rail building was done in response to the mythical success of railways elsewhere, above all in England. The anxiety to compete with northern European rivals, a constant need to prove themselves equal if not superior to their neighbours, is still an important factor in Italian decision-making today. The emotions that fuelled local campanilismo had carried over onto the international scene, as if collective identity for the Italians could only be asserted through competition. Copying the English model, as they did, buying locomotives and machinery from England and coal from Germany, Italian companies forgot that in England the railways had been introduced into a booming industrial economy where demand for transport was intense and coal and steel readily available. In Italy, on the other hand, many railways were soon being seen as cathedrals in the desert. Fewer people or goods were moving around, and since salaries were low, fares too had to be kept low. Train use per person in Italy remained far below that in England, Germany or France right into the mid-twentieth century. One problem was the complex ticketing, with so many different companies each having their own byzantine rules. In Le ferrovie, Stefano Maggi quotes this letter written in 1869 by a member of parliament to the Minister for Public Works:

  Last week, coming back from Florence to London, I found myself sitting with a number of English and American travellers, some of whom were returning from the Orient, via Brindisi. It’s not an exaggeration, Minister, to say that the trip was a constant series of complaints about Italian railways; these travellers were simply amazed that a smart, modern people like the Italians could put up with so many vexations … With regard to paper money, they told me an incredible story. A traveller wanting to buy a ticket costing 15.75 lire handed over 16 lire in National Bank notes. The people at the ticket office refused to accept them insisting that 1.75 lire should be in silver or coppers and the rest in banknotes. Since the traveller didn’t have 1.75 lire in coins he said it was fine if they kept the 25 cents change from the 16 lire: he was told that the Company was not in need of charity and they wouldn’t give him a ticket.

  It all sounds dreadfully familiar.

  In the 1880s the Italian parliament, irritated with the poor showing of the private companies that held concessions to run the railways, actually debated the possibility of making the late arrival of a train a criminal offence. It is hard not to sympathise, though one might as well legislate against the rain. In Luigi Bertelli’s 1907 children’s novel Il giornalino di Gian Burrasca, translated as Diary of a Bad Boy, the nine-year-old Gian Burrasca, running away from
home on a train, remarks, ‘Dad was really right when he bad-mouthed the rail service!’

  But these were also years of heroic achievement, tunnels through the Apennines, tunnels under the Alps, feats of engineering beyond anything that had been done in England or Germany. Indeed, it was this explosion of activity in building the railways that led to the development of the engineer as a figure distinct from the architect, but equally respected in Italian culture, to the point that Ingegnere, Engineer, is a form of address in Italian equal to Doctor or Professor. And it was through constructing a network of railways across some of Europe’s most arduous terrain that the newly formed Italian nation won a reputation for ingenuity and adventurous construction projects. In the 1860s three Italian engineers invented a blast-hole drilling machine that used waterpower to compress air that then turned the drill bit; previous drills had been steam-driven, which meant that when digging tunnels vertical shafts had to be sunk to the tunnel face to remove the coal smoke. It was this Italian invention that made it possible to dig the Moncenisio tunnel under Fréjus in the western Alps in 1871. More than eight miles long and taking forty minutes for a train to cross, the tunnel reduced north–south travel times across the Alps by twelve hours and allowed British companies trading with India to get their goods from London to the port of Brindisi in just forty-seven hours. Italy thus began to attract trade to its ports that had hitherto gone through southern France. But 177 workers died building the Moncenisio. And more than 600 died of lung diseases after working on the nine-mile-long San Gottardo tunnel, completed in 1882. The longest Alpine tunnel was the Sempione; at twelve miles and five hundred yards it would be the longest tunnel in the world until 1979, when the Japanese went a mile longer. So whatever one says about punctuality and ticketing bureaucracy, you always have to take your hat off to the courage and expertise that built these railways. When a man is introduced to you with the title Ingegnere – Buon giorno, Ingegnere Rossi; piacere, Ingegnere Bianchi – you have to show a little respect.

  Alas, all this hard and brilliant work rarely paid monetary dividends and certainly not in the short term. Railways really are the ultimate test of whether a capitalist model can ever be adequate in the sphere of public transport. If we want railways, we have to pay for them, and if we ask those who are travelling on the trains to pay the full price of the financing in the first few years of their use, then no one will travel on them and we will never have trains at all. This is an investment amortised over decades; centuries, even. The newly constituted Kingdom of Italy wanted railways and wanted the prestige that railways brought at a time when rapid, punctual train travel was the most visible indicator of collective wealth, progress and modernity. But they didn’t want to pay for them. They didn’t have the money to pay for them. This will be a familiar set of circumstances in many countries; one thinks of Britain when the Channel Tunnel was dug. The companies to which the Italian government gave the franchises to build and run the various lines, companies often owned by ministers’ friends and relatives, found they couldn’t after all make the handsome return on investment that the English had made; they had imagined they were doing something furbo and would clean up and instead they had done the country a great service and were looking at serious losses. But if they weren’t to get rich, they could hardly be allowed to fail either, for trains had become part of the social and economic landscape and to lose them would mean dreaming up a quite different vision of the future. As a result, all kinds of clever accounting had to be invented for the government to prop them up. It was to be, and still is, an absolute staple of the Italian railways, whether public or private, that in some way or other, acknowledged or unacknowledged, they were/are being paid for, or hugely subsidised, by the state, a state that was/is itself greatly in debt. As early as 1869 Mark Twain was puzzled by the phenomenon:

  There are a good many things about this Italy which I do not understand – and more especially I can not understand how a bankrupt Government can have such palatial railroad depots. … As for the railways – we have none like them. The cars slide as smoothly along as if they were on runners … These things win me more than Italy’s hundred galleries of priceless art treasures, because I can understand the one and am not competent to appreciate the other … But … this country is bankrupt. There is no real foundation for these great works. The prosperity they would seem to indicate is a pretence. There is no money in the treasury, and so they enfeeble her instead of strengthening.

  By the end of the nineteenth century Italy was indeed in deep trouble, facing hunger marches and large-scale protests, at least in part because of the careless public spending that had so amazed Mark Twain. In 1905, now in a period of severe economic depression and unrest, the government was finally forced to nationalise the railways. Italy was the first large state to do so (only Switzerland had gone earlier), and the railways were the first industry to be nationalised in Italy. Negotiations were marked by the first national strike involving a large and influential union, this because the railway workers refused to accept the no-strike clause in the contracts of state employees.

  At this point there were 102,000 railway personnel, more than the total number of Italian civil servants and by far the largest body of organised labour in the country. They were also a closely knit workforce, wearing uniforms, forced by long and unsociable working hours to develop an esprit de corps, proud of their technology and responsibilities. Through the coming years, and particularly during the First World War, in which the railways played a huge role, these men would become more and more militantly socialist and then Communist. After nationalisation they won themselves an eight-hour day, which forced their new employers to more than double the number of railway workers, to 226,000. Add to that the large pay increases necessary to keep this dangerously powerful group happy and it was clear that the railways would be a severe burden to the taxpayer for decades to come. In 1914 the legal expert Giuseppe Cimbali, contributing to a wide-ranging document on aspects of public administration in Italy, wrote:

  Aware of being a crucial part of the central and miraculous movement of modern life, railway personnel reckon themselves a cut above all others and believe they are owed every kind of indulgence and privilege. Feeding on the violence unleashed by steam engines and electric dynamos, they refuse to accept any bridle or limit. Accustomed to racing along at vertiginous speeds, they react at once to any attempt to hold them in common chains.

  Reading this, one appreciates why, even today, whenever a capotreno approaches you to check your ticket, you have the impression you are dealing with a police officer or even a soldier. Public notices warn that ‘the ticket inspector is a public official’, and announcements in the stations declare that ‘refusal to show him a valid ID is a criminal offence’. It also explains why it is still illegal to take photos in Italian railway stations; apparently they are essential to national security.

  1,196 railway men died in wartime activities between 1915 and 1918, and 1,281 were decorated. After the armistice Italy annexed the railways of Trentino, the South Tyrol and the northern Adriatic as far as Trieste, more than six hundred miles of lines. The railways were also central to the huge patriotic ceremony arranged for the entombment of an unknown soldier that was to give a cathartic closure to this first traumatic national war fought on national territory: on 29 October 1920, a coffin bearing the soldier’s corpse was loaded onto a train in Aquileia, a small coastal town east of Venice and in an area that had seen fierce fighting among Italian, Austrian and German troops; from there, stopping for ceremonies in every station and cheered at every level crossing it was taken down to Rome, where it arrived four days later, on 2 November, the Day of the Dead. In triumph and grief, the image of the train was fused with mass patriotism.

  Two years later almost to the day, another train traveller heading north to south was greeted with noisy celebration on his arrival in Stazione Termini: Benito Mussolini. The 1922 March on Rome was greatly facilitated by Fascist elements among the railw
ay workers who arranged special trains for the marchers from northern Italy down to the capital. Mussolini himself hung back, waiting to see if his coup was going to succeed before finally boarding a regular night train that left Milano Centrale at 8.30 p.m. and arrived in Roma Termini at 10.50 the following morning, an hour and a half late. Over the next twenty years Il Duce would make train punctuality a test case for Fascist efficiency. Brutally hard on left-wing unionism, he cut the workforce by more than 50,000 men, making sure that the most militant were among those to go and introducing a railway militia to monitor workers’ behaviour. This heavy stick was then balanced with a paternalist carrot: health care, cheap food and cheap housing made the railway workers a highly privileged group. Recreational spaces and organisations were encouraged, in particular the famous Associazione Nazionale Dopolavoro Ferroviario (After-Hours Railwaymen), which promoted group holidays and sporting activities. In 1928 the Baedeker was able to reassure foreign tourists that the trains in Italy were running mainly on time.

  Yet it was during Fascism that the long decline began. A drastic downturn in the economy in 1929 cut the numbers of passengers and the volume of freight. The roads were now beginning to offer serious competition and a radically different vision of the future. Some smaller lines were substituted with buses. The regime responded with a programme of hi-tech investment. Since coal was an expensive and politically sensitive import, a resource foreign governments might easily withhold from them in the event of sanctions, the Fascists speeded up the process of electrifying the main lines, particularly in the northern mountains, where they were able to exploit the territory’s hydroelectric resources and hence alleviate the problem of coal smoke in tunnels. Italy was and still is ahead of other countries in railway electrification. New lines were laid between many main stations to shorten the distances. In 1937 an Italian electric locomotive achieved the world speed record for a train in commercial operation with an average speed of 106 miles per hour on a regular passenger trip from Bologna to Milan.