That is what I have tried to capture in this book.
Part One
THE TRAIN OF THE LIVING DEAD
2005
Chapter 1
VERONA–MILANO
ITALIANS COMMUTE. EVERY September I receive a letter from the administration of the university where I teach, in Milan, reminding me that since I am not resident in the city, I have to apply for a nullaosta for the forthcoming year. This piece of paper, signed by the rector himself, will say that nulla ostacola … nothing prevents me from working in Milan while living a hundred miles away, in Verona.
What on earth could prevent me? Only Trenitalia, the railways.
As so often in Italy, there is no official form to fill in; you have to make up the request yourself. This can cause anxiety when Italian is not your mother tongue and you are aware that there may be special formulas and terms of address. A university lecturer does not wish to seem inept.
‘What if I just ignore it?’ I once asked a colleague. ‘It’s only a formality.’
That was many years ago, in the nineties. I was innocent then. It was explained to me that in Italy a formality is a sort of dormant volcano. It might seem harmless for years, then suddenly blow your life away. So, one day, if I misbehaved in class, or supported the wrong candidate in some hotly disputed faculty election, the rector might decide that Trenitalia really wasn’t reliable enough for me to be resident in Verona and work at the university in Milan. In the same way, in Italy, after years of neglect, certain laws on accounting or political-party fund-raising might quite suddenly be vigorously enforced for reasons that have little to do with someone’s having broken the law. Never say only a formality.
Rather discouragingly, the colleague who enlightened me with this dormant volcano analogy later suggested that I might want to apply for an available lectureship in Lecce. Disturbed, I pointed out that if Milan was a hundred miles from Verona, Lecce was six hundred. At that point surely the nullaosta would not be a formality at all. ‘There’s an overnight train, Verona–Lecce,’ I was told. ‘No problem. You could go twice a week. Or stay the week and come home at weekends.’
It was a serious proposition. Hundreds of thousands of Italians do this. In Milan I have colleagues who are resident in Rome, in Palermo, in Florence. I have students who return to Naples or Udine every weekend. Thousands upon thousands of miles are travelled. Italians like to live where they live – where they were born, that is – with Mamma and Papà. Then they commute. Even when it offers no work, your home town is always the best town; a thick web of family ties and bureaucracy anchors you there. Trenitalia connects these city states. It makes the nation possible and allows it to remain fragmented, allows people to live double lives. Not for nothing is the holding company called Le Ferrovie dello Stato. State railways. Nulla ostacola.
TO BE PRESENT AT a nine o’clock lesson or thesis commission in Milan, I have to get the 6.40 Interregionale from Verona Porta Nuova to Genova Piazza Principe. It’s the train of the living dead. But at least, leaving home at six, many of the city’s traffic lights are still only flashing yellow. You can move. You can even stop moving and park.
Verona’s main station was rebuilt, like the roads around it and the nearby stadium, for football’s 1990 World Cup. The cup took place before the roads were finished, at which point urgency if not interest was lost. The big teams of the time didn’t come to Verona. I vaguely recall Belgium beating Uruguay. I can’t remember the names of the other teams. Did anybody go and watch? In all my later years as a season-ticket holder at the stadium no one has mentioned these games. But the hastily conceived road system will be with us for decades to come, an underpass on a tight bend that has claimed a dozen lives, and likewise the attractive stone floor inside Verona Porta Nuova Station. It’s made of small dark metamorphic slabs that mix a highly polished, almost mirror finish with mottling patches of rough gritty brown. Very stylish. When the Tangentopoli, or Bribesville, crackdown on political corruption began in the early nineties, it was suggested that much of the building for the World Cup in Verona had involved the mayor and his cronies giving contracts to friends and relatives. No one paid more than a brief visit to jail. No one really thought that this was an especially bad thing to have done.
Alas, even at 6.15 in the morning there’s an impossibly long queue at the ticket windows. The serious commuter has to have a season ticket. But what kind of season ticket? In England now there are different tickets for different trains run by different companies. There is the confusion and clamour of free enterprise, and, in an attempt to balance supply and demand, there are differently priced tickets for peak and off-peak travel. This is annoying, but comprehensible and all very Anglo-Saxon. In Italy the complications are of a different nature. Truly to get a grip on them would be to understand Italian politics and social policy since the Second World War.
First and foremost, train tickets must be cheap, and be seen to be so. People’s desire to live in one city while working in another, coupled with the fact that Italian salaries are among the lowest in the European Community, require this. A student has to be able to afford to travel home every weekend or every other. The friends you make at primary school are your friends for life. You can’t be without them. Who will do your laundry, if not your dear mother? There are few launderettes in Italy. So to travel from Verona to Milan –
