AT 7.40 THE TRAIN stops in the town of Brescia. This is Lombardy now. Suddenly a middle-aged man a few seats down from me comes to life. He jumps up, slams open the window, and is leaning out, beckoning to friends on the crowded platform. ‘Qua, qua. In fretta!’ Here, here. Hurry! He is saving seats for them, a coat on one, a bag on another, a newspaper on the next. In less than five minutes the train is crowded, it’s packed. People are standing, pushing. No one can find space for their bags. Worse still, everybody is talking. Everybody seems to know each other.
This is something I have never observed in England. There, on a commuter train, most of the passengers are shut away in themselves, in a newspaper, a book, or trying to prolong the dreams of an hour before. There’s a pleasant melancholy to the journey. But not on the Interregionale to Milan. These dead are alive, which is so much more disconcerting. Either the travellers are neighbours in Brescia or work colleagues in Milan. They form knots of animated discussion all down the carriage. Some knots know other knots and intertwine and snag. Students swap study notes. Football, politics and the proper way to prepare an asparagus risotto are urgently discussed. I insert a pair of yellow sponge earplugs.
But it isn’t enough. Half a dozen men and women in their early thirties are crowded around me. There is usually one who does all the talking while the others offer occasional confirmations or objections. When the sexes are mixed, the one talking is always a man. ‘Juve was let off an obvious penalty again.’ Juve or Juventus is one of the so-called Big Four football teams – Juventus, Inter Milan, AC Milan and Roma – that invariably win the championship. ‘Did you see? Una vergogna.’ It’s a suit speaking, in his thirties with a nasal voice, a scrubbed bank clerk’s face, an earring, a sneer, a bright red tie. He laughs and jokes constantly. The women exchange indulgent smiles. Two of them are standing arm in arm, touching each other. There’s a strange collective consciousness to these groups, something quite physical. They like their bodies and they like their accessories, their handbags and laptops and mobiles and tiny designer backpacks. ‘Look at this I bought. Look at this.’ They finger the new material and touch their friend’s arm.
‘Joke,’ begins the red tie noisily. ‘Listen up. So, Berlusconi’s son asks his papà advice about how to lay some girl he’s hot for, right? And old Berlusca tells him, “Stefano, first you buy her a diamond necklace, va bene? You take her to an expensive restaurant, book a room in a five-star hotel and make sure there’s a chilled bottle of the finest champagne on the bedside table. And she’s yours. Go for it.” “But Papà,” his son protests, “isn’t love supposed to be free? I don’t want her to think I’m buying her.” And what does Silvio reply?’ The man smiles brightly before the punchline; he’s extremely pleased with himself. ‘What does il buon Silvio say? “Free love?” he says. “Romance! That was just a story the cheapskate Commies invented so they could fuck for nothing!” So they could fuck for nothing!’
The others titter and groan. Someone remembers something a talk-show host said the previous evening about the way referees were selected for Serie A football games. I resign myself to an hour of forced listening, albeit with the pleasant muffling effect of the earplugs.
Recently, prompted by God knows what hypersensitive traveller, Trenitalia began to talk about the possibility of a ‘quiet carriage’ for those who didn’t want to talk. But before going ahead with this revolutionary project they decided to carry out a survey of passenger attitudes. The newspapers published some responses. Most fascinating were the people who simply didn’t understand: ‘If I don’t want a guy to talk to me,’ one woman says, ‘I know how to tell him to leave me alone.’ ‘People can talk or not talk as they choose,’ observes a student. They simply could not grasp the idea that some of us might want to be quiet to read and work. ‘What happens if I’m in the quiet carriage and my phone rings?’ somebody objected. With this simple observation he was sure he had demonstrated the folly of the project. No more was heard of it.
ONE OF THE THINGS that indicates the importance of the railways in the Italian psyche is how often they are chosen as a target in political and industrial protest. In the late nineties I remember looking up from my book on the way to Milan – in the company as always of the living dead – and noticing that the train was stationary. It was an unscheduled stop; we were sitting still in flat, open fields, poplars and pylons the only scenery. We could hear vehicles hooting and a rather odd background noise, something like the lowing of cattle. I stood up and pulled down my window. It was the lowing of cattle. A group of farmers had filled a field with tractors and driven a couple of cows onto the line to block the trains. Banners protested about EC milk quotas.
Time passed. Hanging out of the window, I saw that a TV camera had arrived. There were policemen, too, who seemed to be chatting to the farmers. Somebody banged down a window in a carriage further up and started shouting insults. ‘comunisti! fannulloni! [Slackers] Pagliacci! [Clowns] Merde!’ The farmers shouted back. There were gestures of the variety that rival fans exchange at the stadium: scorn, derision.
When the ticket inspector came by I asked him why the police
