Head to toe with a trained observer

 
Ian Thompson27 June 2013

Italian Ways: On and Off the Rails from Milan to Palermo
by Tim Parks (Harvill Secker, £16.99)

In Italy, trains are often of a biblical slowness and unreliability. Down in the mezzogiorno (the hot “midday” of Italy), compartments can turn pungent with the smell of rough wine and sardine panini. Eating lunch on the state railways is a trencherman’s ritual; afterwards the carriages are left strewn with bits of orange peel. Italian trains are not always clean or comfortable.

Italy has more than 16,000km of ferrovie (iron ways). Importantly, they had served to unify the nation after independence in 1861. With Italy’s hodge-podge of peoples, foodstuffs and dialects, the struggle towards nationhood in the mid-19th century was bound to be problematic. The railways helped bring together the peninsula’s bewildering mixed bloods and ethnicities. Thanks to the north-south network of ferrovie, Italians of Albanian, Norman, Saracen, Greek and Germanic descent could at last feel unified as Italic kin. Italy’s history as a nation-state might almost be reconstructed through an account of its railways, suggests Tim Parks.

Parks, who has lived in Italy since 1981, is best known for his three memoirs, Italian Neighbours, An Italian Education and A Season with Verona, which offer a variation on the Toujours Provence-style evocation of local life abroad. Italian Ways, a hybrid of travel and cultural history, offers more of the same, and very amusing it is too.

During his 30-odd years in Italy, Parks has learned to love the ferrovie in all their rackety glory. He gets into fights with on-board inspectors and is intolerant of passengers who intrude their pungent foodstuffs and loud voices. Yet the “ironways” and the magnificent scenery they often traverse remain a glory to Parks.

Italian rail fares, moreover, are among the lowest in Europe; travelling through Calabria’s wild interior on the Ferrovie dell Stato is a visual education in the grand style. British railways are by comparison “overpriced, clumsily privatised and manifestly unhappy”, says Parks.

His book is filled with jocose thumbnail sketches of passengers and their overheard conversations. Parks himself emerges as a somewhat prickly character, easily offended by Italian train staff and station bureaucracy in general. Why get so uptight? You can fume and fuss all you like about Italian red tape, but most foreigners learn to accept it — you have to.

Unlike many British expatriates in Italy, Parks is not in the least patrician. His roots are in suburban Blackpool and Manchester, where his father was an evangelical clergyman. Italian Ways alludes to the hellfire shrieks and holy-roller howls of the author’s low church childhood.

The Catholicism Parks encounters in the course of his train journeys to Italy’s “extreme south” could not be more different. In the town of Lecce he finds Baroque churches run wild under the influence of the Spanish court. Cornices swirl around columns; caryatids adorn altars. Lecce is a monument to the stonemason’s art — an “enormous fruit bowl”. Parks has done Lecce and all Italy proud in this eccentric hosanna to railroad locomotion.

Go to standard.co.uk/booksdirect to buy this book for £13.99, or phone 0843 060 0029, free UK p&p

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