Italian Ways Read online

  As you enter, there’s the till to your left. Aggressive notices warn the clients that they mustn’t bring their own food into the cafe, or order at the bar and then carry their drinks over to the tables. But of course everyone knows this anyway. Almost at once you realise that the staff is hostile. A sort of poison gas pollutes the atmosphere. They don’t want you to be here. They have nothing to gain by your presence. Sit at a table and you risk waiting far too long. Go to the bar and you find you need to pick up a receipt at the till first. If you want to eat, you must first go to the bar to examine what’s on offer, then back to the till by the door to describe it and pay for it, then back to the bar with your receipt to try to catch the attention of barmen who are barely polite.

  As I wave my receipt in the direction of two men behind the bar – vainly, alas – a young woman beside me complains that she asked for a macchiato and has been given a straightforward espresso. Instead of apologising and rectifying the mistake with a quick dash of foamy milk, the man complains that she didn’t ask for a macchiato. He’s a southerner, in his fifties, with a supercilious curl to his lip, and a little white hat worn at an angle that suggests he doesn’t want to be wearing it.

  ‘Actually, I ordered from your colleague,’ the woman says, ‘and he shouted the order to you. He definitely said macchiato.’

  The woman is patient, rather pretty, with pale skin, full cheeks and raven hair.

  ‘Oh, we want to be unpleasant, do we?’ the waiter asks. ‘Had a hard day, have we?’

  The woman closes her eyes and very slowly shakes her head from side to side. The waiter’s colleague, a new recruit, hurries for the milk jug.

  What’s fascinating here is how the same nation produces such contrasting stereotypes: the resentful, slow, station barmen in the shabby, ill-kept public space, where everything is difficult and unhappy, and the bright and bushy-tailed figure, working twice as hard but cheerful with it in the busy street bar. I’m sure, for example, that the same man, if moved from one environment to another, would change his manner entirely. The quality of his conversation, his dress habits and above all his cappuccino would be utterly transformed.

  Perhaps the deciding factor is not just the business of having a public or private employer with all that that entails in terms of job security (and hence freedom to gripe) in the public sector, and more cash under the table (assuming you work your butt off) in the private. No, perhaps it’s more a question of the kind of clientele the different places attract.

  The barman in the small street bar has the privileged feeling of being at the centre of a community. He loves to know all his customers’ names and, better still, their jobs. He loves to give you a flattering title as you walk through the door, and to call it out loud right across the bar so that everybody will hear. ‘Salve, Professore!’ all three barmen cry when I walk into the bar near the university. In this way everybody present knows who they are rubbing elbows with. ‘Buon giorno, Prof,’ says the quieter barman on Via Gustavo Modena near where I sometimes stay the night. How he knows I’m a professor I have no idea. They call to other customers, too. ‘Buon giorno, Dottore! Salve, Ragioniere! Ciao, Capo!’ Someone is filling in his lottery card. ‘Play eleven, Dottore,’ calls the barman. ‘The number of the month of the dead always brings good luck.’ ‘Not for a cardiologist!’ the man replies. Everybody laughs. ‘Sciocchezze, Dottore!’ Their voices are a pleasant mix of respect and light irony. And if you greet them warmly and share a word or two about Inter’s tribulations and above all never forget to bid them good day when you leave, they will always serve you well.

  This leads inevitably to the reflection that the person who is just passing through is always a second-class citizen in Italy. The barmen in the Gran Bar in Centrale resent the fact that they see most of their customers only once. They will never know their names and occupations; hence, in a certain sense, these people non esistono, they don’t really exist. Only their money proves they were here. Or worse still, their vandalism. For the casual visitor cannot be expected to show the same respect for his environment as the person who must return. Chairs are knocked over, surfaces are scratched and scribbled on.

  Away from the bar, in the street and the workplace, this resistance to the bird of passage is one of the greatest hurdles that the immigrant to Italy has to overcome. One of the most common questions still asked me by new Italian acquaintances is, ‘When are you going back [to England]?’ Recently, when the local newspapers felt that I had said something about Verona that I shouldn’t have, the mayor of the town publicly declared, ‘Visitors to our city should be careful what they say.’ The lady in question is also an MP for the European Parliament. She was aware that I had been living in Verona for upwards of twenty years. I pay my taxes.

  SO MORE OFTEN THAN not I get my sandwich and bottle of water from the small stand-up bar in the centre of the concourse. I don’t go inside, where you have to pay first and take your receipt to the three barmen chattering and griping around the coffee machines. Outside there is a small stand with just half a dozen kinds of sandwiches and drinks. No coffee. Nothing fancy. This place is constantly manned by just one busy person. I know all four of the people who work here. It’s intriguing how much more generous and cheerful they have become now that they recognise me. Piadina e acqua naturale, I ask. But they saw me coming, they already have the bottle on the counter, the sandwich in the toasting machine. The piadina is a round of pitta bread folded over a wodge of prosciutto crudo and soft Fontina cheese. They smile while they wait for it to heat up. They tell me which are the busy moments and which the slack. There is a tall, vigorous man in his forties, completely bald with a shiny scalp, and three women, all friendly and serious. Some places are so unpromising to look at and so appealing when you become a regular.

  OFTEN I TAKE MY piadina to one of the stone benches on the platforms and eat to the sound of the station announcements. Many of the trains have such splendid names – Ludovico Sforza, Andrea Dorea – that it’s really a pleasure to listen to them. Leonardo da Vinci, Tiepolo, Giorgione, Michelangelo. These are not the names of the actual, physical, locomotives, nor of any particular carriages, just the name announced when whatever rolling stock is being used for such-and-such a route at such-and-such a time approaches the station. The Brenner Express, the Gianduia. It’s the name, as it were, of the event that is this train.

  The station announcements are pre-recorded in segments and then tacked together, presumably by computer, as appropriate. As a result, the words come in little mechanical rushes – di-prima-e-seconda-classe – pause – con-servizio-di-ristorante-e-minibar – pause – and then a dramatic flourish when one of the big train names is pronounced – MICHELANGELO! – VIVALDI! Apparently it was impossible for whoever recorded the initial pool of information not to read out such glorious names without intense and understandable pride.

  The same goes for the names of one or two of the big city stations. At the announcement of Genova Piazza Principe or Venezia Santa Lucia, for example, there’s a sudden increase of volume and urgency that cuts through the monotonous flatness of the PA system. So a typical afternoon announcement at Milano Centrale, listing the train number, name, and details of its time and platform of departure and destinations, echoes around the huge old building thus:

  Intercity – Sei – Zero – Otto – UGO FOSCOLO! – di-prima-e-seconda-classe – delle ore – sedici – e – zero cinque – conserviziodiristoranteeminibar – per – Venezia Santa Lucia! – è in partenza dal binario – quattordici – si ferma a – Brescia – Desenzano – Peschiera – Verona Porta Nuova – San Bonifacio – Vicenza – Padova – e – Mestre – carrozze di prima classe in settori – B – e – C.

  It’s curious in these announcements how one has to listen to all kinds of information that is absolutely standard for all Intercities (first and second class, buffet, minibar, etc.) before they tell you where the thing is actually going. People stand on the platforms in rapt attention, waiting patiently for the only
two pieces of information that matter: the destination and the platform. For who has any notion of the code numbers of the trains, or even their names? And since no one pays any attention to this information, but again no one complains about having to listen to it, you can only assume that these formulas have taken on a sort of liturgical function, not unlike the repetition of the names Hang Seng and Dow Jones in more or less every news bulletin, as if any of us cares what the Hang Seng had done this morning or might do tomorrow. This constant, reliable, decorous repetition perhaps transmits to the harassed passenger the sensation that, rather than simply heading home a little the worse for wear after another dull day at the workplace, he is in fact part of some grandiose, never-ending ceremony. This is not such a zany idea in the lofty temple that is Milano Centrale.

  Maybe because I spoke almost no Italian when I first came to live in Italy, there are certain words I actually learned from hearing railway station announcements, words that remain forever associated in my mind with le Ferrovie dello Stato. Anziché, for example, and coincidenza. Anziché can occasionally be heard at the end of a pre-recorded announcement. They’ll read out the whole spiel of your train description, its name, number, various services and stops, and right at the end, just when you thought all was well, you’ll hear, ‘partirà da – binario – nove – anziché da – binario – tre’. Platform nine instead of platform three. What you thought was going to happen, isn’t. Routine is interrupted. The folks on platform three begin to trudge back to the concourse.

  I don’t know why but I have a special affection for anziché. There is something elegant and measured about it, like a person who keeps calm in a crisis. I’m always glad to hear anziché. I repeat it to myself under my breath. And when I hear it in other circumstances I always think of changing platforms.

  Coincidenza is often heard together with anziché, but this time the voice will be alive, urgent, a real person speaking into the microphone. Something is happening right now.

  Coincidenza is a curious word with a number of meanings. It can mean coincidence, in the sense of two things corresponding in some way, or happening at the same time, though it’s not often used in the English way to suggest that a certain potentially significant happening was actually pure chance. For that the Italians say caso. È stato un puro caso.

  When talking trains, coincidenza can be the word used for a connection. In Milan the train for Venezia waits for the train from Genova to arrive (maybe!) so that people can make their coincidenza. People love to complain about their coincidenze bestiali – nightmare connections. But the word is mostly used to announce a sudden and altogether unexpected development that requires an urgent response.

  ‘Coincidenza, coincidenza!’ Suddenly a young woman’s voice is speaking directly to us through the PA. She’s husky, anxious. The liturgical calm of the recorded voice is gone. ‘Coincidenza! Interregionale per Verona parte dal binario sei, anziché dal binario quattro. Il treno è in partenza. Il treno è in partenza.’ Since it’s not unheard of that they’ll announce a train as in partenza, about to depart, when in fact it’s already moving, it’s gone, the coincidenza announcement can cause panic and is often immediately followed by this warning: ‘Passengers are reminded that it is forbidden to cross the lines! It is forbidden to cross the lines.’ And in fact four or five young people have jumped down from the platforms onto the lines. They are running across. Every year one or two people will lose their lives crossing rails.

  Even more ominous than anziché and coincidenza is the dreaded word soppresso. On strike days, despite the fact that maybe 80 per cent of the trains aren’t running, they nevertheless broadcast all the mechanical announcements absolutely as usual; the whole daily timetable is sung out as on any other day, with the sole difference that at the end of each train description, the simple word soppresso is tagged on, in a rather louder voice than the rest. So you might hear:

  Interregionale – Quattro – nove – due – di-prima-e-seconda-classe – delle ore – otto – e – cinquantacinque per – Milano Centrale! – è – SOPPRESSO!

  Cancelled.

  Sometimes five or six trains will be conjured into existence, one after another by the famous mechanical voice, only to be brutally dismissed: SOPPRESSO!

  It’s amusing watching the uninitiated tourist trying to get to grips with this. They hear their train announced. Treno – Intercity – Otto – uno – tre – Gabriele D’Annunzio! – they begin to congratulate them-selves – di-prima-e-seconda-classe – surely no one would announce a train so confidently if it wasn’t running – delle ore – diciassette – e – zero – cinque – they check their watches, yes, it’s on time – per Bari Centrale – this is it, kids, we’re headed south – è … and then comes that terrible word – SOPPRESSO!

  Once I saw a Japanese girl checking the word in a pocket dictionary. I could see her lips mouthing the s and the p. Consternation. My dictionary gives: sopprimere: put down, repress, suppress, abolish, liquidate, eliminate. There is no doubt in my mind that whoever recorded the word did so with a certain vindictive pleasure. At home sometimes when the kids were smaller, I used to announce: Il gelato – their eyes lit up – delle ore – diciannove – e – ventidue – that’s now, Stefania! – di – pistacchio – e – vaniglia – yum yum – con – cono-di-biscotto – è – Soppresso!

  Cattivo, Papà!

  THE EVENING TRAINS ARE telefonino time. If I’m early and manage to catch the 17.25. Interregionale, things can get pretty noisy. People are less worried about being overheard in a big open-plan carriage than in the more controlled space of a compartment. There are men still involved in business calls, discussing ball bearings and delivery dates. There are mothers telling their children how to prepare dinner: ‘The fusilli, not the macaroni!’ A student complains that she was treated badly in an oral exam: ‘The professor asked something that wasn’t in the book, and he wrote the stupid thing!’ Boyfriends and girlfriends are weighing up the advantages of pizzeria and trattoria. ‘I’ll be in Brescia around eight,’ says a tense, pale man in his late thirties. ‘Make sure there’s a prosecco in the fridge.’

  As the train pulls out of Centrale the capotreno, speaking over the PA, invites the gentile clientela not to disturb other passengers with their loud conversations and to turn off, or at least turn down, the ringtones of their phones. The announcement has exactly the effect of a speed limit on the Rome–Naples autostrada. So I have listened at length to a Sicilian man in his forties, quite a few seats away – olive skin, white shirt, gold cufflinks – discussing his ugly divorce with his lawyer, his new girlfriend, his mother, his brother and a variety of other people whom it was harder to place. This for the whole one hour and fifty minutes from Milan to Verona. To all of these people he repeated with great relish the phrase ‘un inferno durato dieci anni – a ten-year inferno – un inferno, ti giuro’, glancing around at the rest of us in the carriage as if for approval or sympathy.

  Between Peschiera and Verona a funny scene repeats itself on almost every trip. Passing through the low hills at the bottom of the lake, the phone signal begins to break up; it comes and goes for a while, then disappears altogether. ‘Ci sei?’ the woman beside me is suddenly asking. Are you there? She raises her voice. ‘Can you hear me?’ asks the man opposite. And then three or four voices in unison. ‘Mi senti? Pronto? Pronto? Mi senti. Ci sei? Mi senti?’ All at once they are all looking in each other’s eyes, vaguely embarrassed, as if, while they had been speaking on the phone they were invisible somehow, and now, all of a sudden, cut off in the cutting, they must confront each other, and find themselves faintly absurd.

  We’ve crossed the Valpolicella now. The line from Trento joins ours from the north, then the line from Bologna comes in from the south. Already you can see the limestone hills above Verona, the stadium, the ugly round sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes, which looks down on the city from the first hilltop. Only the Church could get planning permission for a horror like that. The PA system crackles and an urgent vo
ice announces: ‘Avvertiamo i signori viaggiatori che tra pochi momenti arriviamo alla stazione di Verona Porta Nuova, Verona Porta Nuova!’

  When you get off the train in Italy it’s a point of politeness to say buon viaggio to those who remain. I like these little rituals, however empty and formal they appear. ‘Buon viaggio,’ I say to the woman who has been speaking on her mobile for most of the way. I try to mean it. The woman smiles and nods. It’s the first time she’s noticed me. ‘Buona sera,’ she replies graciously.

  IF FOR SOME REASON I’m desperate to get back to Verona as early as possible, I’ll take a Eurostar. But I have to be desperate, for this is the train I like least. Unlike the Intercity, it doesn’t offer the intimacy of compartments. The days of the train compartment are numbered. The existence of trains with compartments suggests a community that is more or less homogeneous and at home with itself, a society where maybe you risk finding yourself saddled with a noisy companion, but not a nutcase who wants to murder you, a terrorist from some country you’ve never heard of.

  The design of the Eurostar screams out, This is our vision of the future, this is stylish Italy, techno Italy, high-speed Italy. The long, sleek carriages are made to seem longer and sleeker still with three continuous bands of colour running the length of the train, locomotive included: a green band at the bottom, then a white, as if to hint at the Italian flag, and then a long, long line of shiny black, which masks the separate windows and prevents them from interrupting the hypnotic, forward-flung streamline of the thing. As you look at the Eurostar, and even more when you travel in it, you can’t help regretting the times when it was still possible to design something without being obliged to create the impression that science fiction is becoming reality and utopia is just around the corner. It isn’t. The aisles of the Eurostar are narrow, the seats are cramped. It’s true that the so-called Pendolino design of the locomotive, which allows the vehicle to lean (pendere) into the bends, means it can travel faster on ordinary lines, without the need of the straighter and smoother rails that French high-speed trains require. But given that these traditional lines are already very busy, it’s hard for the Eurostar to exploit this advantage.