Italian Ways

by Tim Parks

  Again he sighs and says, ‘You do not have a printout. You do not have a ticket.’

  From this point on I find it hard to recall the exact progress of the dialogue, for the simple reason that I lost control. I was suddenly trembling and furious, far beyond anything that appeared to be at stake. Why had this crucial change been made, I demanded, without warning the traveller up front rather than in a tiny rule that didn’t even appear on the screen without scrolling to the bottom? ‘A PDF is a stampa, a printout,’ I told him. ‘If I tell my computer to print it asks me if I want to print out a PDF.’ In what way was the printout on the screen any different from a printout on paper? What piece of information would he get with paper that he wasn’t getting on the screen? None. Nothing.

  ‘To me a printout means paper,’ he said.

  ‘Remember, I actually volunteered this information when you asked if there was anyone who hadn’t had their ticket checked. I could have just kept quiet. Surely that indicates I’m in good faith.’

  He shook his head. ‘Without a paper printout I can’t accept that someone has a ticket.’

  My voice began to wobble, perhaps my Italian slipped, my Englishness became more evident. An inspector is used to these confrontations. You’re not. You’re like the amateur who agrees to spend five minutes in the ring with the professional wrestler. I asked him whether, given that the regulations were new and given that the mistake I had made was understandable, he wasn’t willing on this one occasion to turn a blind eye. He didn’t even respond. He simply looked at me as if I were becoming too pathetic for words.

  ‘I’m not paying a fine,’ I said.

  ‘You don’t have a ticket,’ he told me. He had to ‘regularise’ my situation. That was his job.

  ‘I’ll get off at the next stop,’ I said. This, as we have seen before, is one way of resolving a ticket problem without formalising a fine. Logically the man could have insisted on fining me, but he hadn’t actually started writing out the fine.

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Make sure you do.’ Smiling faintly as he turned away, he said, ‘And make sure you read the regulations before you travel on Trenitalia.’

  No sooner had he turned his back than the people around me exploded into conversation. The girl next to me wanted to see the PDF at once.

  ‘It doesn’t say anything about paper,’ she said. ‘Only a stampa.’ A printout.

  ‘There are no avvertenze on the online tickets for the frecce,’ someone commiserated. ‘There was no reason why you should have gone and looked for them for a Regionale.’

  ‘If you were a pretty girl,’ the boy across the aisle said with a laugh, ‘there would have been no problem.’

  ‘That guy’s one of the most pignoli,’ somebody else agreed.

  At this point, the inspector, perhaps hearing the tones of indignation, strode back down the aisle to defend himself. ‘If you people would only –’ he began.

  ‘Who the hell are you?’ I demanded.

  I had totally lost it. The kids around me were agog. In particular the boy opposite had his mouth hanging open.

  ‘You’re the ticket inspector, right?’ The tone of my voice had shifted into an unpleasant treble. ‘I’ve agreed to get off your train, right? Conversation over. Go and inspect tickets. Isn’t that what they pay you for?’

  ‘You people like to complain, but –’

  ‘Stop!’ I yelled. ‘You have no right to interrupt a conversation between passengers on the train. We want to talk among ourselves. We can think what we like about you and your rules. We don’t want to talk to you. I’ve agreed to get off the train, now basta!’

  The man looked at me, weighing up the situation, pursing his lips. He had displayed a weakness and he knew it. First he had acted with unreasonable inflexibility, then he had shown that he didn’t want to be ill thought of, he wanted to split me off from his regular, as he saw them, Regionale travellers. That was an error.

  ‘You have no right,’ I repeated. ‘We do not wish to speak to you.’

  He looked at all of us. Myself and seven students, all with their books and laptops, abundant hair and scanty summer clothing, all viscerally against him. I had the feeling he was now seeing us all as privileged, whereas he came from a more honest, older world where workers had worked long hours and voted Partito Comunista Italiano and deserved protection from foreigners and electronic tickets. With a mocking bow he said ‘Chiedo scusa, signore,’ and stalked off.

  The youngsters were all respect. No sooner was the conflict over, however, than I was appalled. Why do I rise to this kind of bait? I wondered. Why had I been so rude, so shrill? I stood up to pull my bag down from the luggage rack. I’m sick, I thought.

  ‘You’re surely not really going to get off,’ someone protested. Everyone seemed amazed when I stood and got my bag down.

  ‘But you’ve paid for your ticket!’

  ‘You can’t be serious. What’s he going to do, get the police? They’ll take one look at the PDF and laugh at him.’

  ‘He won’t dare come back the whole trip, he’ll just go to the other end of the train and hang out with his assistant.’

  I sat down with my bag on my knee and thought about it. So, all these young people, young Italians, had understood my offer to get off the train not as a real offer, but as a way of defusing the argument, or creating an honourable stand-off, such that the inspector could continue to inspect and I could stay put and everybody would be happy. But I hadn’t meant it like that. And I wasn’t sure the inspector had understood it like that. Particularly not after his return and my inexcusable outburst. He would surely relish a chance for revenge if I offered it to him.

  The train was approaching Peschiera. A few folk planning to visit Gardaland were standing up. Should I stay? Should I go? If I stay and he doesn’t come I will spend the next hour and a half in a state of anxiety and won’t be able to do any reading for the prize. If I stay and he returns there could be an almighty showdown, perhaps leading to legal action. I was aware that I couldn’t vouch for my own responses.

  But there was something deeper: this whole culture of ambiguous rules, then heated argument about them without any clear-cut result, seems to serve the purpose of drawing you into a mindset of vendetta and resentment that saps energy from every other area of life. You become a member of society insofar as you feel hard done by, embattled. Others oppose you, or rally around you, for the entertainment. Almost everyone has some enemy they would like to crush. They become obsessed. They speak constantly about bureaucratic issues. Italian universities are full of such people, people who have been denied promotion because of some obscure regulation, people who have seen others promoted above them officially because they fell foul of some arcane paragraph in the university’s constitution, but in reality because the promoted person is a friend of a friend of the vice rector. The whole football scene in Italy is a farcical factory of these emotions, a gaudy theatre of mimed tribal conflict. To hang on in the train now, so that I could either boast before an appreciative audience that I had outwitted or faced down the inspector, or worse still so that I could plunge into a conflict that would engage my energies for months to come, would be to become more intensely and irretrievably Italian. No doubt about it. And all these young people around me wanted that. They couldn’t conceive of my taking any other course of action at this point. They wanted to see the end of the drama, the defeat of the public official or the confirmation that all the cards are stacked against the individual in his battle with the state. But my dream had always been to buy a ticket, use it and travel in relative comfort, hopefully getting a little reading done on the way.

  The train was slowing down in Peschiera. On the platform Mickey Mouse and Scrooge McDuck were still shooting it out twenty years on. ‘Buon viaggio e buona giornata,’ I told my disgusted supporters and headed for the door. In the ticket office I paid twice the price of my original ticket for a seat on the next Frecciabianca, which arrived and departed from platform two only twenty
minutes later, and after an uneventful journey spent reading Rohinton Mistry’s excellent novel A Fine Balance, I arrived in Milano Centrale some five minutes ahead of the Regionale Veloce that I had so ignominiously bailed out of. I thus had a last chance to wait for the train and confront my antagonist again, perhaps to tell him that I planned to write about the incident in a book where I hoped he would come off extremely badly. For thirty seconds I seriously considered this option in the great arrivals hall of Milano Centrale. I looked up to the chalky friezes of warriors hacking each other to death, a huge advertisement for Nike with the ominous slogan, in English, HOW FAR CAN YOU RUN?, and another poster inviting me to gamble for cash on my mobile phone. Surely the best thing to do, I decided, was to hurry to the university and get on with my Englishman’s life in Italy.

  Part Three

  TO THE END OF THE LAND

  2012

  Chapter 5

  MILANO–ROMA–PALERMO

  I’M SCARCELY SURE what nationality I really am these days. All I know is that for the past thirty years I’ve lived and worked in northern Italy, and like most of the people around me I know little of the south, though the south is always present to us as an idea – a bad one, for the most part. The news we get of the south does not endear it to us. It is Gomorrah, it is corrupt, it soaks up our tax money, and when it isn’t corrupt it is superstitious, primitive, sentimental, saccharine. In Milan the presence around us on the streets and in the workplace of all the southerners who have escaped to come to a serious place to work only confirms our opinions. And having made the journey north, these southerners are understandably eager to convince themselves they have done the right thing; they rarely speak affectionately of their home without a certain sigh that reminds you that, much as they love it, it was impossible to stay. The fact that so many politicians are southerners doesn’t help; Italian politicians rarely inspire confidence. So when a northerner travels south he does so more often than not with a slight sense of trepidation, as if entering a different zone – a different country, even. I remember once, when travelling to see Hellas Verona play in Naples, as the train drew to a standstill beside police lined up with batons, an older fan warned me, ‘We use our fists, they have their knives.’

  But all of a sudden, I had an urge to head south. Perhaps it was the 150th anniversary of Italian unity in 2011 that started it. During the celebrations people in Milan and Verona just could not have been less interested, never mind festive. The Northern League, a powerful xenophobic and separatist faction in northern Italy, was depicting Garibaldi as a bandit, a terrorist, whose 1860 expedition with the glorious Mille to capture Sicily and the south had merely saddled the north with an unwanted burden and a constant source of cultural contamination. Everybody was talking federalism and autonomy. At the same time, David Gilmour’s book The Pursuit of Italy was making waves. Gilmour’s learned conclusion is that the Risorgimento was a huge mistake and that Italy would govern itself better if split up once more into a dozen city states. Frankly, I think that this is a complete misreading, a text-bound academic’s misreading, of Italian quarrels, like the friend who imagines a couple should split because they quarrel and talk about splitting. The truth is, you know the Italians are a people because the way they argue with each other is quite different from the way they argue with foreigners. It is their way of being together. Gilmour also underestimates a current of national idealism that runs beneath the surface of Italian cynicism. Garibaldi embodied that idealism. I for one have benefited enormously from the legacy he left, having spent almost all my adult life in a peaceful, united and, all things considered, relatively prosperous Italy.

  But in any event and for whatever reason, fine words aside, I just wanted to head south. July 2012 was the time to do it, and the trains were the perfect way to travel. What better yardstick than the national railway for judging whether the south was really part of the nation? I would head down to Sicily, starting in Palermo, then, combining work and holiday, try to get around the coast of the island, then back to Calabria and right around the toe, instep and heel of the boot from west to east. That would mean pulling in towns like Reggio Calabria, Crotone, Taranto, and the splendid yellow-stone centro storico of Lecce, where Trenitalia hits the final buffer in distant Puglia. We would see if the FS of the extreme south was the same old FS I knew on the train of the living dead.

  Yet I didn’t start the journey on state railways. For at last, at least on one stretch of line, those words ‘Thank you for choosing Trenitalia’ are no longer a mockery: from Turin to Milan to Rome and on to Naples, you can now travel with Italo.

  In short, it was the completion of the high-speed line that finally brought a little real competition into being. The reasons are easy to understand: the infrastructural investment had been so huge that the government and the FS were desperate for anybody willing to pay to use it. There was plenty of spare capacity available. The high-speed lines had been equipped with a new form of electricity supply that ordinary freight and passenger trains couldn’t use. Trenitalia simply doesn’t have enough frecce to keep the lines busy if they wanted to. It was the perfect space for some ambitious entrepreneur to step into.

  But it could hardly start without controversy.

  Nuovo Transporto Viaggiatori (NTV) opened its new travel centre, Casa Italo, in a refurbished air terminal built beside the railway lines at Roma Ostiense, a secondary rail station in the west of the city. The handsome building, designed by Julio Lafuente for the 1990 World Cup, already housed a new branch of Eataly, the consortium of restaurants and shops selling traditional Italian food products.

  The idea was that passengers for the new private rail service would park in the large adjacent car park, or simply emerge from the metro, buy their tickets in this clean, modern building, and step right onto the Italo, NTV’s new and rather beautiful maroon-coloured train, holder of the present world speed record, which departs from the open platform right beside the building and promises to make the trip to Milan in two hours and forty-five minutes.

  Utopia.

  However, the night before it opened, an eight-foot-high steel fence went up between the travel centre and the train it was providing tickets for. Passengers thus had to, and still have to, go down two flights of stairs, or an escalator, and walk through almost a thousand feet of underground passages before returning to ground level up more flights of stairs or another escalator (on which no doubt everyone is standing still) to reach the train, a few yards away from where they bought their tickets.

  Who could have done such a silly thing? Rete Ferroviaria Italiana, of course, the part of the FS group that runs the rail infrastructure and that in fact stands to gain €140 million a year from Italo’s use of its high-speed lines. But, of course, RFI and Trenitalia are still very much hand in glove, and though it’s nice to get Italo’s money, it would be unfortunate if the newcomer were allowed to become more convenient than the frecce. Accused of raising obstacles to free competition, RFI released a statement speaking of the need for physical barriers between railway property and public streets, a need that only became urgent the day people could buy a ticket for a rival train. The organisation then conceded that a gate might be opened in this fence, but this hasn’t happened. Italo passengers troll unnecessarily back and forth through the passageways standing behind Trenitalia passengers on the escalators. In any event, it was the erection of this barrier, again so emblematic of how Italy works, or doesn’t, together with that miserable clash with the Trenitalia inspector who wouldn’t accept that on-screen e-ticket, that made me absolutely determined to take the Italo on the first leg of my trip to the south.

  Needless to say, Italo hasn’t been allowed to leave from Milano Centrale, but from Milan’s ugly secondary station of Porta Garibaldi, about half a mile away. If the revolutionary fighter’s story is remarkable for clarity of trajectory, for flamboyance in idealism, for focus and consistency of purpose, as when, having beaten the Austrians by Lake Como, he marched gloriously int
o Milan right at this part of the city in 1859, Stazione Garibaldi is an amorphous, sprawling mess. And while Garibaldi the hero is immediately acknowledged as achieving a spiritual aristocracy worthy of the grandeur of Milano Centrale, Garibaldi FS is the home of the humdrum, arrival point of tens of thousands of yawning commuters brought in daily from the north and west on endless convoys of miserable regionali.

  There is nothing here that declares itself as a main entrance. The shapeless building bleeds its travellers into the surrounding streets from any number of open wounds. Running around its glass-and-concrete facade is Viale Don Luigi Sturzo, a fast, nondescript road immediately linking to faster, more nondescript motorways rushing people out of town. Don Luigi Sturzo was the Sicilian priest who in 1919 formed the Partito Popolare Italiano, forerunner of the Christian Democrat Party. As such he championed the notion of Catholics engaging in politics as a group with its own agenda, which, of course, did not necessarily correspond to a national agenda. Garibaldi would have loathed such an idea. It has sometimes occurred to me that the Ferrovie dello Stato are a kind of Catholic Church. It has that suffocating monopoly status of being more important than its supposed principles and goals, ‘a state within a state’, as one politician called it, as early as 1870. In that case Italo might be a hateful, freethinking, nonconformist rebel, bearer of the gospel of real competition. In any event, it feels like a good omen for my trip to Sicily and the south to leave from Stazione Garibaldi.

  Comically, to the eastern end of the station, Viale Don Luigi Sturzo runs through Piazza Sigmund Freud. I doubt that the Austrian therapist would have made much progress with the dysfunctional national family implied by the names of Garibaldi and Sturzo. In fact, the piazza is now a mess of rubble in the ongoing process of redevelopment that has made this part of Milan the most modern and the most unliveable and unwalkable. One evening, returning from Florence, my train stopped in Porta Garibaldi rather than Centrale. It was onward bound to Turin, and Garibaldi has the advantage that trains can run through it without having to be turned round. Climbing down on the platform, it was not immediately obvious which way one was supposed to go to exit the station. I set off down a staircase and found a corridor at the bottom but no signs or directions. ‘Where’s the metro?’ I asked the girl walking down behind me. Since it was late at night, she seemed anxious that I might be trying to approach her. How could there not be signs for a metro in a major railway station? She looked around and frowned.