CONTENTS
ABOUT THE BOOK
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ALSO BY TIM PARKS
LIST OF MAPS
DEDICATION
TITLE PAGE
PREFACE
PART ONE / THE TRAIN OF THE LIVING DEAD
CHAPTER 1
Verona–Milano
CHAPTER 2
Milano–Verona
PART TWO / FIRST CLASS, HIGH SPEED
CHAPTER 3
Verona–Milano
CHAPTER 4
Milano–Firenze
PART THREE / TO THE END OF THE LAND
CHAPTER 5
Milano–Roma–Palermo
CHAPTER 6
Crotone–Taranto–Lecce
CHAPTER 7
Lecce–Otranto
EPILOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
COPYRIGHT
About the Book
In Italian Ways, bestselling writer Tim Parks brings us a fresh portrait of Italy today through a wry account of his train journeys around the country. Whether describing his daily commute from Milan to Verona, his regular trips to Florence and Rome, or his occasional sojourns to Naples and Sicily, Parks uses his thirty years of amusing and maddening experiences on Italian trains to reveal what he calls the ‘charmingly irritating dystopian paradise’ of Italy.
Through memorable encounters with ordinary Italians – conductors and ticket collectors, priests and prostitutes, scholars and lovers, gypsies and immigrants – Parks captures what makes Italian life distinctive. Italian Ways also explores how trains helped build Italy and how the railways reflect Italians’ sense of themselves from Garibaldi to Mussolini to Berlusconi and beyond. Most of all, Italian Ways is an entertaining attempt to capture the essence of modern Italy.
About the Author
Born in Manchester, Tim Parks grew up in London and studied at Cambridge and Harvard. In 1981 he moved to Italy where he has lived ever since. He is the author of novels, non-fiction and essays, including Europa, Cleaver, A Season with Verona and Teach Us to Sit Still. He has won the Somerset Maugham, Betty Trask and Llewellyn Rhys awards, and been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. He lectures on literary translation in Milan, writes for publications such as the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, and his many translations from the Italian include works by Moravia, Calvino, Calasso, Tabucchi and Machiavelli.
Also by TIM PARKS
FICTION
Tongues of Flame
Loving Roger
Home Thoughts
Family Planning
Goodness
Cara Massimina
Mimi’s Ghost
Shear
Europa
Destiny
Judge Savage
Rapids
Cleaver
Dreams of Rivers and Seas
Sex is Forbidden (first published with the title The Server)
NON – FICTION
Italian Neighbours
An Italian Education
Adultery and Other Diversions
Translating Style
Hell and Back
A Season with Verona
The Fighter
Teach Us to Sit Still
LIST OF MAPS
Fig. 1
Italy
Fig. 2
Northern Italy
Fig. 3
Central Italy
Fig. 4
Southern Italy
For all those who love to read on trains
PREFACE
A TRAIN IS a train is a train, isn’t it? Parallel lines across the landscape, wheels raised on steel, the power and momentum of the heavy locomotive leading its snake of carriages through a maze of switches, into and out of the tunnels, the passenger sitting a few feet above the ground, protected from the elements, hurtled from one town to the next while he reads a book or chats to friends or simply dozes, entirely freed from any responsibility for speed and steering, from any necessary engagement with the world he’s passing through. Surely this is the train experience everywhere.
Yet only in India have I been able to stand at an open door as the carriage rattles and sways through the sandy plains of Rajasthan. The elegant melancholy of the central station in Buenos Aires, designed in a French style by British architects, its steel arches shipped from distant Liverpool, has much to tell about Argentina past and present. Certainly the history and zeitgeist of Thatcher’s and then Blair’s England could very largely be deduced from the present confusion of the country’s overpriced, clumsily privatised, manifestly unhappy railways. In America the lack of investment in train travel speaks eloquently of a country always ready to appear righteous but pathologically averse to surrendering car and plane for a more eco-friendly, community-conscious form of mobility.
The train arrived in Italy in 1839 with four and a half miles of line under the shadow of Vesuvius from Naples to Portici, followed in 1840 by nine miles from Milan to Monza. Borrowing from the English, the Italians coined the word ferrovie, literally ‘ironways’. Unlike the English they had little iron for rails, almost no coal to drive the trains, and only a fraction of the demand for freight and passenger transport that the English Industrial Revolution had generated. It was hard to fill the trains and harder still to run them at a profit. But where business wasn’t good there was politics. The Risorgimento process that aimed to unite the peninsula’s separate, often foreign-run states into a single nation was in full swing; all sides in the struggle understood that rapid communication would encourage and later consolidate unification. There were also military considerations. What better way to move a large body of men quickly than in trucks on rails?
So railway building was almost always politically motivated, which again made the commercial side of the operation more difficult. After unification, debates over the routes of strategic lines offered a new battleground for an ancient campanilismo, that eternal rivalry that has every Italian town convinced its neighbours are conspiring against it. Amid all the idealism and quarrelling, by the end of the nineteenth century the railway unions had become the biggest and most militant in the country and hence would play an important role in the struggle between socialism and Fascism; after the Second World War they became central to the government’s policy of keeping the electorate happy by creating non-existent jobs and awarding generous salaries and pensions. More than one person has claimed that the whole history of Italy as a nation state could be reconstructed through an account of the country’s railways.
But this is not a history book, nor exactly a travel book, though there is travel and history in it. Nor did I plan it and set to work on it in quite the same way I did with my other books on Italy. A few words of explanation are in order for the passenger who has just purchased his ticket and climbed on board Italian Ways.
My first sight of Italy came through the windows of a train. It was dawn
