Italian Ways

by Tim Parks

  But why now, when we’re all so used to carrying our bags – there are no porters in Italian stations – and they no longer mix freight and people?

  There must be jobs at stake.

  Although the ferry is mostly dismal, a sort of giant Meccano raft, and the toilets, the day I travelled, flooded, the funnel and upper structure have recently been repainted to blazon the logo RFI on the funnel: Rete Ferroviario Italiano. Names again. Image. Looking back over the ship’s wake, I can see other, more modern ferries zipping back and forth, no doubt with plenty of capacity for the rail travellers on this train. This is only a two-mile stretch of water. A week after this trip I would discover that in 2010 RFI had ordered a new ferry for the journey, again with the capacity to load rail carriages. The contract went to Nuovi Cantieri Apuania, a company based in Liguria, near Genoa. At the time, the managing director of the company remarked on the achievement of winning the €49 million contract against international competition and said how pleased he was that his men could now start working again after a period of idleness and lay-offs. One wonders if it would have won the contract if the commissioning organisation was not so closely allied to the Italian state. In any event, the new ship was now ready for service, but the shipyard workers were refusing to launch it until they received guarantees that they would not be laid off immediately afterwards. The obvious solution would be for RFI to spend another €49 million on another ship.

  ON THE END OF the harbour wall, beneath a 150-foot column topped with a bronze statue of the Madonna, these words appear in huge letters:

  VOS ET IPSAME CIVITATEM

  BENEDICIMUS

  As I took pictures in low sunlight, a mother beside me explained to her little boy that Messina was a città Mariana, and that while still alive the Madonna had met some men sent to Palestine from Messina and she had written them a letter to take back to Sicily that finished with these words, in Latin: ‘I bless you and your town.’ One can see how much more attractive such stories are than thoughts about the economics of ferry boats.

  I had a bit of a panic getting down to the train again. You would have thought it was easy to find a train in the bottom of a boat, but actually, no. There were an extraordinary number of stairways and corridors and no signs telling passengers where to go, as if perhaps we hadn’t been supposed to leave our compartments at all. All the signs there were led you to the car deck. Eventually I did manage to retrace my steps and found a group of people down in the hold uncertain as to which was which of the two segments of train now side by side, one bound for Siracusa, one for Palermo. In the end, I spotted the languid soldier boy and followed him back to our compartment. It was encouraging to think that he could orient himself better than I could.

  A long wait began. Our carriage crawled out of the boat into a dock siding and sat there for an hour. There was no explanation, no information. My fellow passengers grew angry. I wondered if my hotel would keep my room. Night fell. ‘Abandoned,’ the tubby woman announced again. ‘Sicily is completely abandoned. They despise us.’ Again she called her husband about her giramenti di testa, though she had seemed in fine fettle during our afternoon conversations and had said nothing about her health problems despite the suffocating heat in the compartment. Then everybody called relatives to warn them to delay their departure to the station. I was the only one, it seemed, who would be proceeding under my own steam on arrival. Fearing just such a delay, I had booked a hotel a hundred yards from the station.

  Eventually the tubby woman lost her patience, jumped to her feet and, with no sign of any dizziness, rushed out onto the platform, where she had spotted the capotreno. Rather oddly he then accompanied her back to our compartment, poked his head in and explained that there was una collega, a ticket inspectress, who was late arriving because the train from Palermo was an hour and a half late. Ours was the last train from Messina to Palermo this evening, so we were waiting for her before departing, so she would be able to get back home.

  While the man, avuncular and calmly authoritative in his uniform complete with green tie, was explaining this to us, it all seemed entirely reasonable and almost inevitable. Only when he had gone did the young girl, she of the Etruscan neck, wonder why two hundred people had to wait for one person who actually worked for the railways and could presumably be put up in a hotel if necessary.

  ‘When we get to Trapani it will already be time to leave,’ she wailed.

  ‘Una collega,’ the woman with the pink fan said pointedly. ‘It’s a woman they’re waiting for.’

  ‘The capotreno’s wife,’ I offered.

  ‘Or mistress,’ the fat woman insinuated.

  ‘Or daughter,’ someone else said forgivingly.

  In any event, it was a scandal.

  By the time the train lurched into serious motion, it seemed like the six of us had known each other for years. ‘My husband’s such a bore,’ complained the woman who lived two hundred yards from the station. ‘He always tries to get out of picking me up.’

  The tubby woman smiled complacently, as if to say, Why don’t you tell him you get fits of dizziness? The boy beside me took the nth call from his mother asking him for a progress report. ‘How the hell should I know where we are?’ he shouted, peering out into the dark. ‘It seems they’re already on the platform in Palermo,’ he told us. ‘They’ll be waiting for hours.’

  Then the train stopped at the tiny station of San Piero Patti.

  And didn’t set off.

  ‘We’re not supposed to stop here, are we?’ I asked.

  ‘Waiting for the train to come the other way,’ the soldier boy commented.

  ‘Oh, the Englishman didn’t realise!’ The tubby woman was oddly triumphant. ‘What do you think, mister, that they would give us two lines? In Sicily!’

  Thus I discovered that while the Ferrovie dello Stato had been investing €150 billion to build a high-speed line between Rome and Milan, they had not bothered to double up the line to Italy’s fifth-largest town, the principal city of Sicily. We arrived in Palermo shortly before midnight, where I witnessed the soldier boy being smothered with Mamma’s kisses on a platform with palm trees. The revolution could wait.

  ‘POSSO DARE UN’OCCHIATA ALLA sua mappa?’

  There was only one person standing under the departures board in Palermo Centrale Saturday morning, a woman in her thirties, with austere cheekbones and flaxen hair pulled tightly back in a small ponytail. I spoke to her in Italian, out of a respect I myself am rarely shown, but I guessed that if there was any conversation it was going to be in English. Sure enough, when she looked blank and I asked, ‘May I take a look at your map?’ she handed it over.

  The problem was that the destinations on the departures board didn’t correspond to anywhere I knew. I had planned to go to Trapani, at the western tip of the island; I had checked on Trenitalia’s website before leaving the hotel. There was a train departing at 10.39 a.m. that arrived at 1.28 p.m.; two hours and forty-nine minutes to go sixty-five miles. With two changes on the way. It seemed excessive, but I could always read, I thought. Or just watch people. Except that, on arrival at the station, the departures board had no trains leaving at 10.39, nor did any of the destinations posted seem to fit in with a trip to Trapani. I needed to understand where these places were.

  The severe blonde woman spoke in a bizarre singsong English full of unusual mistakes, in the sense, I suppose, that they were not the mistakes I’m so used to hearing Italians make. She too had been planning to get the train to Trapani, she said, it was the obvious tourist destination. One felt this natural desire to arrive at the land’s limit. ‘I’m from Latvia,’ she added, as if to explain her disorientation.

  The map wasn’t very helpful. I scanned the coast north and west of Palermo. There was no sign of Cinisi, to which three trains were headed. But my eye was attracted to a small seaside place to the west called Isola delle Femmine – Girls’ Island or Women’s Island. It might be a fun place for a swim, I thought.

&nbs
p; We looked around for help. Come to any major railway station in northern Italy on a Saturday or Sunday morning and you’ll find it fizzing with families off for the weekend, hikers, mountain bikers, raucous football fans, the stolid Japanese, the African girls, quiet couples headed for art exhibitions with plenty of reading material for the journey, groups of Boy and Girl Scouts squatting around mountains of backpacks. The information office will be open, there will be plenty of ticket sellers at the windows, plus the lines of expensive new ticket machines. The bars will be full of people grabbing a quick cappuccino, others telling the barman exactly how much grappa they want in their espresso corretto. You have a strong sense of a community enjoying itself.

  Here the only dozen or so people in the fairly large ticket hall were all queuing up at the one ticket window that was open. Beyond them, glass doors revealed a lush little chapel with satiny wood, polished marble and comfortably upholstered seating for maybe forty; all the dark chairs were directed to a sombre crucifix and sugar-white Madonna complete with an array of electric candles at her feet. The investment was considerable, but nobody was worshipping. Nobody was using the two brand-new ticket machines; they were the variety that take only credit cards. Apparently this was not the kind of place where anyone would want to set up a shopping centre.

  I went to one of the ticket machines, touched the screen, and then tapped in T R A P A N I. Dutifully, the display suggested the same train my computer had proposed, the 10.39. Again I looked at the departures board: there was no 10.39. But there was something rather odd going on. The trains were not shown in strict order of time, earliest at the top, latest at the bottom. An eleven-something appeared above a ten-something. I shook my head and double-checked. Three departures were not in the ‘right’ place. I had never seen this before. Perhaps they had some other ordering system.

  I played around a little more with the ticket machine, asking it for times to here and there, and it soon became clear that its data bank referred to some virtual rail network that had little to do with what was happening at Palermo Centrale that Saturday morning, assuming anything was happening at all. It was one of those fascinating moments when you realise that the usual connections between the information systems we live and move in mentally and the real world our feet are obliged to negotiate only come at the expense of great effort. The map is not the territory, as the philosopher Alfred Korzybski famously said.

  We went through to the platforms where five or six old Regionali were lined up among palm trees in giant pots, as if in some episode of Thomas the Tank Engine where the locomotives get to take an exotic holiday. Finally we tracked down two FS employees smoking outside the Left Luggage Office. They shook their heads. ‘Trapani, by train? At the weekend?’ It was amusing that someone had thought of such a thing. ‘Go by bus,’ they advised. ‘There are plenty of buses. Much quicker.’ They began to give directions to the bus station. I began to understand why Trenitalia had opted for the high-speed Rome–Milan rather than doubling lines in Sicily. Even if they were doubled they might not get used.

  We bought tickets for Isola delle Femmine. The severe and severely perplexed Latvian, who was named Zane (pronounced zah-ney), had asked if I would mind her coming along. She worked in Oslo, she said. On a complete whim she had booked herself on a flight to Sicily, thinking she would enjoy seeing the sights for two weeks. Instead she understood nothing. The heat was killing her. She constantly feared she was being cheated. The shops and public services, she said, reminded her of Eastern Europe before the wall came down. It was disquieting. She was shocked.

  Sympathising, I slipped into the role of ‘he who knows the ropes’ and suggested an orange juice before our train left. Freshly squeezed orange juice is one of the summer pleasures in Italian bars, and all the more so, I imagined, in Sicily, where the oranges actually grow.

  ‘Ice?’ the bartender asked.

  I avoid ice, I explained to Zane, because it gives the juice a watered-down taste. There was a huge pile of oranges looking very thirst-quenching on the corner of the counter. The man slammed a knife through four or five and began squeezing.

  When he handed us our two glasses, the juice wasn’t just room temperature, it wasn’t just warm, it was positively hot. Like tea. Now it was my turn to be shocked. The Latvian asked if people always drank their juice at this temperature. Her accent got strangely mixed up with cadences of wild incredulity. I stared at the pile of oranges but couldn’t understand how they had got to be so hot. Had someone just pulled them in from the sun? Or left them in an oven? And I couldn’t understand why the barman hadn’t explained this. Not that a couple of cubes of ice would have made much difference. Anyway, Mr Expert was so no more.

  Never mind. Orange juice is orange juice. Drink it down. Coming out of the station bar I noticed that right beside it there was a McDonald’s, which was doing slightly better business. A McDonald’s in Palermo railway station. No doubt they catered to people who wanted their food and drink to be exactly as they expected it. The general atmosphere, meanwhile, was one of a few people taking time out in a lethargic backwater, fully aware that the real action lay elsewhere.

  HOWEVER, AND MUCH TO my surprise, the train to Isola delle Femmine was brand new, a two-carriage model I’ve since discovered they call the Minuetto. Who thinks of these names? Its bright blue seats were so clean and the floor so spotless it really felt as if the Latvian lady and the English gentleman were the first two passengers it had ever accommodated. Certainly we were the only ones travelling that Saturday morning. The inspector arrived smiling cheerfully, as a man should when he realises he’s being paid for doing nothing. Young, fleshy and friendly, he was remarkable for the mass of dense black hair exploding from the top of his regulation FS shirt. He hadn’t bothered with the regulation red FS tie. Perhaps the rules are waived when the temperature gets into the mid-thirties.

  ‘Tickets, please,’ he said at once, in English. He turned them over in his hands and noticed with appreciation that we had had them stamped regolarmente. He completed the ritual by punching in two square holes. Then, since he didn’t seem to have much else to do, I asked if by chance he knew whether one might proceed from Isola delle Femmine to Trapani, since the two stations seemed to be on the same line westwards. At once he pulled a little machine from his pocket, the very kind the capotreno from Verona to Milan had told me regionale ticket inspectors were not issued. Was it possible that Sicily was ahead here, even if there were no tickets to check? Alternately tapping the screen and scratching his red neck with the little pointing device, then shaking his head, grunting and beginning again, growing steadily more perplexed, he finally worked out that we could indeed reach Trapani today.

  ‘At 8.55 p.m.,’ he announced to us at 10.30 in the morning. He seemed pleased that Trenitalia had this service to offer. I didn’t trouble him to check whether, assuming we took this opportunity, we would be able to get back to Palermo the same day.

  The coast to the north and west of the city would be stunningly beautiful were it not for a suburban wasteland of declining and abandoned industries. Isola delle Femmine, just ten miles away, turned out to be a quaint little fishing village whose transformation into a satellite town had apparently been arrested some years ago. It was languishing. I asked a young man where we might go swimming and was directed beyond the little harbour with its fishing smacks and luxury yachts along a busy road with no pavement and no coastal path. Just tarmac, rocks, sea. An endless stream of vehicles, all with Palermo number plates, filed by; presumably their occupants hadn’t wanted to spend €2.25 on the train. The heat was overwhelming.

  Taking the lead from the way the Americans give names to their hurricanes, the Italians have recently started personifying the anticyclones that push north from Africa and make the summer weeks so torrid. Myth and ancient history provide the name pool. Caronte – that is, Charon, death’s ferryman – had paddled up the peninsula coasts a few weeks before. Now we had Crete’s cruel tyrant Minos, who was torturing us
all with temperatures in the high thirties.

  Names for the trains and now names for the weather; this constant desire to give human narrative and drama to all kinds of phenomena, as if thirty-six degrees with fast traffic on one side and a dazzling sea on the other weren’t dizzying enough. I was beginning to feel like it must be quite ordinary in Sicily to suffer from giramenti di testa. No sooner had the rocks turned into pebbles and begun to look swimmable than there were bars and hotels whose owners had fenced off the sea approach and proclaimed the ‘beach’ private. We’d gone almost a mile before a small patch of unclaimed boulders and grit looked like a place where we could finally take a dip. There was no shade. The Latvian lady again said that she felt it had definitely been a mistake to come to Sicily.

  Returning to Palermo in the early evening, we had to stand. Hence we discovered who it was that really used the trains. Aside from some sun-dazed day trippers, the carriage was jammed with extra-comunitari carrying the big red boards, perhaps five feet by five, on which they pin the trinkets that they sell along the beaches: beads, bracelets, hair clips, headbands, cheap jewellery and small toys, all plastic, all made in China, to be sold by Africans on Italian beaches, all outside any tax net but taking wise advantage of Trenitalia’s cheap fares to get their goods to market.

  Over the coming week, travelling the coasts of Sicily, Puglia and Calabria, I was going to see a great deal more of this. Lean black men in jeans and T-shirts humping these heavy boards back and forth for the benefit of the white Italian beachgoers. So although Trenitalia never employs extra-comunitari, the African immigrant’s initiation into Italy inevitably seems to involve the trains: the prostitutes in the north, shuffled and reshuffled around the various town centres, these hawkers along the coast. Chatting together, trying to stop their boards from entirely obstructing the doors and corridors, all in possession of regularly stamped tickets, the men don’t seem too unhappy with their lot. Perhaps there are worse ways to spend the day than stepping between bodies in skimpy bathing costumes.