Italian Ways

by Tim Parks

  SMILING MY SCEPTICISM, I left the cathedral. The automatic rosary was getting on my nerves. But then on return to the station, again regretting that this was the end of the line and that after my walk round Lecce le Ferrovie dello Stato had nothing to offer me but the long journey home, I experienced a little miracle of my own. I looked up at the departures board and saw the word Otranto. How could that be? A vision? I hurried to consult the Trenitalia departures timetable, a printed yellow poster on the wall, but nothing. The departure wasn’t there. Nothing went south of Lecce. I thought of going out to the platforms to see if the train was really there, but I didn’t have a ticket, and it was late in the day to be travelling to Otranto, since I still had my hotel in Brindisi, an hour to the north. On the other hand, why not look at it at least, this ghost train that couldn’t be? A mystery worthy of Walpole’s Gothic novel.

  In the underpass beneath the platforms a large German shepherd dog was stretched out on the tiles, taking refuge from the sun. The stairs climbed to a last track; then you had to cross the rails to another, the very last, where a single ancient one-carriage train was pouring out diesel fumes. Was it the train to Otranto? I asked, mystified. Not exactly, I was told. First you changed at Zollino for Maglie, then at Maglie for Otranto.

  ‘But one can get to Otranto?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I hurried back to the ticket hall and waited my turn. The problem was that tomorrow I had planned to take fairly leisurely trains from Brindisi all the way back to Milan, since the morning after that, a Friday, I was due to preside, alas, over a thesis commission at 9 a.m. And thesis commissions, as I always have to remind myself, are appointments that cannot be missed, on pain of legal sanctions. On the other hand, if there was a train to the end of the land, I should take it.

  Struck by a bright idea, I broke away from the ticket queue, consulted the yellow timetable again, and saw that there was, as I suspected, a night train that ran up the Adriatic coast, then across to Bologna, arriving in Milan at 7.10. Assuming it arrived punctually, that would give me all the time in the world to make it to the university and be sitting up on the dais, albeit a little dishevelled, when the students arrived for their great day.

  It was a risk: over six hundred miles by train and a margin for possible lateness of just one hour.

  Do it.

  ‘Can I have a ticket to Otranto, please, for tomorrow? Early in the morning, preferably.’

  The journey was about thirty miles.

  A tired young man looked at me with a mixture of irritation and pity; apparently I had committed a grave faux pas.

  ‘Trenitalia does not have a train to Otranto.’

  ‘But I saw Otranto on the departures board.’

  ‘That is not Trenitalia.’

  ‘So?’

  He hesitated. ‘That service, signore, is run by’ – he sighed deeply – ‘le Ferrovie del Sud Est.’

  ‘And how can I get a ticket?’

  His expression suggested I was pushing my luck.

  ‘Platform one,’ he muttered.

  I WENT TO PLATFORM one, looked up and down, but saw nothing, no sign, no special timetable. As in most stations, platform one carried the main line, in this case bringing passengers from Bari and the north. It was busy. A Frecciabianca was in arrivo. Eventually, after a long walk, beyond all other services, machines and gadgets, beyond even the shelter that kept sun and rain off the platform, poking from the wall just a few yards from the end of the station complex, half obscured by a couple of grey lamp posts in front and with an overgrown siding behind, a discreet green sign appeared: beside the logo FSE was the word biglietteria.

  It was a room eight by eight feet – no benches, no comfort, no design – with a single ticket window and a jolly man sitting behind giving information to four or five customers. Lots of information. Long explanations were necessary, I discovered, because FSE, which I had never previously heard of, ran a complex criss-cross of ancient lines, most dating back to the nineteenth century and never relaid; to get to almost anywhere you had to change twice, and the timetables, posted oddly high above eye level on the wall, were set up in a rather novel way that allowed you, theoretically, to follow your connections by tracing your finger along the columns, then jumping from one to the next where appropriate; apparently the trains themselves were scheduled to meet at stations where the line doubled; here they could pass each other and take the opportunity to redistribute the travellers as they did so.

  I couldn’t follow it; it was too complicated. I realised that without Trenitalia’s actually rather impressive information system, I was lost. Trains for me had become Trenitalia. My mind had integrated with Trenitalia logic, as my fingers on the keyboard had capitulated years ago to Microsoft. Italo had been simple enough: one fast train after another hammering down the same stretch of fast line, no changes, connections or branches. This, on the contrary, was something old, provincial, almost botanical in its branching.

  The bigliettaio laughed. He was in shirtsleeves, spared the Trenitalia uniform, spared that bureaucratic look. He seemed at ease with his exile out on the last gravelly yards of platform one.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he told me. ‘It’ll all be clear once you board.’

  The ticket cost not €60, but €3.20.

  Then, handing me a small square of printed paper, he added, ‘Though we have problems with a driver off sick, I’m afraid.’

  He scratched his head.

  ‘But …’

  ‘I’m sure we’ll work something out,’ he said with a smile. ‘We always do. Perhaps not quite on time, but you’ll definitely get there.’

  ‘And back?’ I didn’t want to be marooned out in Otranto.

  ‘Why not?’ He smiled again. ‘Have faith!’

  Once more the problem of baggage presented itself. If I was going to enjoy my trip to Otranto, but without having a hotel there, since I’d be spending the night on the train to Milan, I needed to find some place to leave my bag. Wikipedia had told me that the station in Lecce did have a Left Luggage Office, but I couldn’t find it anywhere and in the end had to ask at the ticket window.

  ‘Outside the station, turn right.’

  The station had a long, low facade featuring a series of arches in a creamily stuccoed wall, almost a Brighton Pavilion look. The Left Luggage Office was a good hundred yards beyond anything you would have thought of as part of the station, or even to do with the station. There was a door with an improvised sign. I knocked, then put my head in. The room was mainly empty. There was not a single bag in it, nor shelves on which bags might be set. But on either side of a wooden table in the far corner two men in orange jumpsuits were playing cards.

  ‘Chiedo scusa, I need to leave my bag here tomorrow. That OK? Will you be open at eight?’

  One of them looked up: ‘You’ll need an ID.’

  Apparently it was an engrossing game they were playing.

  OUT OF CURIOSITY THAT evening I typed ‘Lecce deposito bagagli’ into Google and found a short chat:

  ‘It’s a shithole that left-luggage place, they steal everything, forget it and go somewhere else.’

  But there was nowhere else.

  I also did a little research on Ferrovie Sud Est. I had imagined a small provincial operation taking over disused FS lines in an attempt to breathe some life and sense back into local transport. Instead the FSE was constituted in 1933 and brought together a number of local lines that for some reason or other had never been nationalised. They were 100 per cent publicly owned and always had been, but locally. In short, an anomaly. Why wouldn’t the line have been nationalised and integrated with the Ferrovie dello Stato? Why wouldn’t its services be at least evident and advertised in one of the main stations it ran from? Why was it possible to book a ticket connecting with French or German railways through Trenitalia’s website – to go, say, to Paris or Munich – but not connecting with another state-run Italian line, to go to Otranto or Gallipoli?

  THE FOLLOWING MORNING, HA
VING taken a very early train from Brindisi, I again knocked on the door of the Lecce Left Luggage Office, which actually looked more like a door to a private home than anything else.

  Inside, two men in orange jumpsuits were sitting at a table playing cards. But not the same two men. This time one seemed vaguely embarrassed to be seen playing cards at 8.15 and hurried out. The other, a surly young man, made a photocopy of my ID and told me I could leave my backpack on the floor, right there at my feet. In it were my computer, my Kindle and an assortment of dirty laundry.

  Not seeing any description of the service or price list, I asked if I had to pay now or later.

  ‘On return. Five euros for the first five hours; seventy cents for every additional hour.’

  The young man spoke good Italian but with no frills, like politeness. I thanked him warmly.

  At 8.53, then, on a remote platform, there were myself, two Japanese girls and one returning student from the north with a huge bag. She had travelled all night from Milan and was exhausted; it was a scandal, she said, that there were no timed connections between Trenitalia and FSE.

  ‘Separati in casa.’ An estranged couple in the same house.

  ‘Già.’

  The sun was now in absolute command. We needed to find shade fast. Fortunately the FSE train was already on the platform. We had started to board when two men appeared and told us this was the wrong train.

  So it began. There was chatter back and forth with these railwaymen, an easy, friendly exchange you rarely get on Trenitalia. It was attractive. No automated announcements here, no sense of a distant, monolithic organisation. Actually, very little sense of any organisation at all. These generous railwaymen explained so much that in the end you understood nothing at all. This train, they said, was going to Zollino and so was the train to Otranto, which should be leaving now, but wasn’t here yet, though it would probably be along soon, but they weren’t sure, because someone somewhere wasn’t answering the phone and someone somewhere else had been ill but was feeling better now, and it would all work out. We should wait for the next train.

  ‘It’s very hot,’ I said.

  ‘There is air conditioning in the station building,’ they said, pointing back across eight platforms.

  ‘The girls have heavy bags,’ I said. It had been a struggle getting them up and down the stairs of the underpass.

  The man considered the bags. The Japanese girls looked bewildered.

  ‘OK, get on this train, then,’ one man decided. It wasn’t clear whether these railwaymen were wearing uniforms. They had the same dark-coloured trousers and shirts, but, as it were, by chance.

  The student now told me in an aside that these men were not giving us the whole truth. She had actually boarded the train, the correct train, to Otranto, shortly after seven when her night train arrived from Milan, and they had let her board, but then asked her to get off again because the train, they said, had to go somewhere to fill up with diesel fuel. She had imagined some ten or fifteen minutes, and now here she was ninety minutes later.

  I sensed at once that FSE was, if not an organisation, at least a ‘happening’ that brought people together.

  In any event, on the advice of our railwayman, we boarded the wrong train, which had truly ancient brown seats bolted to the floor. The driver, a lean man in complacent middle age, came out of his cabin and assured us that it dated back to 1936. I almost believed him, and we set off.

  Yet the stations could not be prettier. They are built in the same pietra leccese as the city’s churches, recently cleaned and charmingly refurbished up front with bright green steel columns to support elegant platform shelters and nice new ticket machines (which I couldn’t for the life of me work out how to use) and all kinds of fresh, bright green, friendly signs, well designed and absolutely attractive. On almost every station there was a blue-and-white plaque thanking the European Community for its financial contribution and itemising the many purchases made with these generous handouts. But one finds the same thankful acknowledgements on Trenitalia stations, too. I photographed one that thanks the European Community for underwriting a

  contract for the supply of services controlling infesting vegetation by mechanical means and chemical formulas along the railway lines and in open spaces falling under the jurisdiction of the regional infrastructure management of Bari, relative to the territorial infrastructure of Bari for financial years 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011.

  Along with the names of everyone involved (the list is long), the plaque also gives the cost of this service: €3,614,750.57. Three million, six hundred and fourteen thousand, seven hundred and fifty euros and fifty-seven cents. ‘To deal with weeds over a four-year period.’

  I always feel that every form of rhetoric and every detail must ultimately have its function and logic. Here, I can only assume that the fifty-seven cents are mentioned to give an impression of honesty and rigour worthy of the fiercest pignolo. It is common knowledge that, together with Sicily, Puglia is one of the two European regions most wasteful in its handling of Community subsidies.

  When we got down at the darling little station of Zollino, a railwayman asked us where we were going and I said Otranto.

  ‘You were on the wrong train,’ he observed.

  ‘But the train to Otranto is coming?’

  ‘I hope so,’ he said. ‘I’d better phone.’

  Unable to understand why they were worried that we hadn’t arrived where we were on the other train, I went into the station to escape from the sun. Again everything was very small, very cute, very new, or at least freshly renovated. Out of curiosity I went to the glass door leading into the street and small village outside. It was locked. How bizarre. We couldn’t get out of the station, and presumably no one could get in. I tried the door again. I must be mistaken. I was not. Outside there was a dead tree and a street of low white buildings with flat roofs. I went back to the platform and asked no questions.

  The train to Otranto arrived. It was of a different vintage than the first – from the sixties, apparently, but similar. Ferrovie Sud Est use orange curtains, which look wonderful when the windows are open all along the carriage and they flap about in the hot, dry air. Actually this train was not going to Otranto either, but to Maglie, whence the third train, the one that really would at last have gone to Otranto, had been cancelled because someone was ill, but not to worry, there would be a bus.

  The railwayman who gave us this news – I hesitate to call these men who spoke to us inspectors, because none of them looked at my ticket and it wasn’t clear if they were attached to any train in particular, or simply using their own service to get to this or that place of work – had a told-you-so complacency about him. It evidently did not occur to him that if there were no passengers the service that gave him his livelihood might one day be discontinued. But perhaps he knows things I don’t.

  The bus took an age. The landscape was flat and dry and very, very stony. White stone walls and groves of dusty olive trees and small, hot, sprawling villages with flat Arab roofs. Every time two roads crossed, invariably there would be a sign to Otranto, and invariably our driver took the opposite direction. There seemed to be a sort of rule about this. I began to find it uncanny, and despite having promised myself a few days ago, on that Regionale from Crotone to Sibari, that never again would I worry about a train’s punctuality, especially if I was on holiday, nevertheless I began to grow impatient. At a place called Bagnolo the driver did it again. And again at another place whose name I couldn’t see. Otranto to the left, we turn to the right. The €60 for the taxi began to look like a deal. Eventually I realised that the bus was doing this so as to visit all the tiny stations the train would have gone through if its driver hadn’t been ill. These stations were no doubt sensibly and very directly linked by rail but not by road. At none of these stations did we set anyone down or pick anyone up.

  But when we did finally get there, the station at Otranto was definitely worth seeing. To be honest it looked more
like a stately home than a station: three storeys of white stucco with fine lines and good, solid, sober proportions. Tall palm trees rose above the roof behind it, a brand-new roundabout had been laid out in front, with attractive stone paving and a lawn and plenty of parking space. Absolutely no cars or buses or people or animals of any kind were anywhere in sight, but the June bugs were deafening. The air was electrically still. While my fellow passengers set off on foot towards the town and the beach, I went into the station. You had to climb a flight of stairs and go through to the other side of the building to reach the head of the platform, which was surrounded by a charming little garden that had a hothouse feel to it. Going back through the station I noticed a ticket window, which was actually occupied. Two men were talking. There was no one to interrupt them.

  THE STREETS DOWN TO the sea offer the typical southern combination of the ramshackle and the haphazard. There seems no logic to their direction, or to the orientation of the buildings thrown up beside them. Scrub, cactuses, sheds, a small cafe, a pleasant bungalow. You cross a busy road, then move down more purposefully towards the sea, the waterfront, the place where all the action is.

  It’s dazzling, a well-rounded bay with perhaps half a mile of promenade, looking eastwards across an absolutely transparent sea, a shimmer of pale turquoise and happy bathers. The road between town and beach is jammed with cars inching along looking for parking spots. The promenade is a line of cafes and restaurants, low prefab buildings mixing outside and inside, packed with holidaymakers drinking, eating and smoking in various states of undress. Everywhere you are aware of commerce satisfying appetite in an atmosphere of easy hedonism. I turn right and walk along the waterfront to the castle that dominates the distant promontory.

  It has nothing of the Gothic castle. It’s just a zigzag of massive brick-built fortifications defending the southern approach to the bay, an absolutely impenetrable vantage point from which to bombard marauding Turks. Walpole’s story of the place as home to an ancient family doomed to extinction by mysterious supernatural powers is sheer fantasy. Inside there is an Andy Warhol exhibition titled ‘I WANT TO BE A MACHINE’. There’s the famous image of Marilyn Monroe in a garishly coloured photographic negative. This is at once hilarious and too much; I can’t bring myself to see it. To think that the railways brought me all the way to the foot of Italy to rediscover Andy Warhol throws me into a state of denial. I opt for a tour of the rest of the building. Windowless underground vaults have been transformed into conference venues. The bare brick of arched walls and ceilings where once prisoners or munitions were housed has been scrubbed clean and softened with discreet lighting. In another room a wedding has just ended. Guests in smart clothes are gathering outside ready to throw confetti over the happy couple. I make a rapid exit.