Two Gypsy women once tried to mug me in Piazza Duca d’Aosta. Thinking about it later, I couldn’t help but admire their boldness. They converged on me from left and right, each taking an elbow and asking for money while grabbing hold of the shoulder bag I was carrying. I had to shout and thrash about in a most undignified manner. It was after that that I finally resigned myself to using a little Italian backpack to carry my underwear and students’ theses, something I’d always resisted in the past, associating backpacks with schoolchildren and beasts of burden. But they do have the advantage that they’re not easily snatched.
Workmen arrived and started redeveloping the piazza. What this means in Italy today is neutralising it, imposing the well-swept hygiene of large expanses of white paving with occasional steps up and down to assert a rigid, linear geometry. Into this austere mental territory are inserted small, rigorously circumscribed patches of green and even a flower bed or two, nature in its most reduced, unthreatening, controllable form. All of this is functional enough, but it’s hard to be enthusiastic, especially in summer, when the sun beats down and there is no shade in which to eat your sandwich, drink a soda or smoke that cigarette.
Then, quite suddenly, in December 2007, right in front of the station, a monolith had been raised. At least that’s what people started calling it on blogs and in newspapers: Il monolite! Il totem! Sixty towering feet of polished steel, with two convex faces about ten feet across, bearing a legend, high, high up: SEGUI IL CONTO ALLA ROVESCIA. Follow the countdown! To what? ALTA VELOCITÀ came the answer a little further down: HIGH SPEED. Exactly 365 days from the moment the countdown started, a high-speed train would leave Milan for Bologna, covering the 134 miles in just an hour, half the present time. An old photo I have of the monolith shows a giant digital counter in the centre whose glowing red figures, about three floors up, give 237.5.56.11, meaning 237 days, 5 hours, 56 minutes and 11 seconds until the departure of that train, which would then arrive in Bologna exactly 60 minutes later, where another totem had been set up in front of that station, counting down to the orgasmic moment of this miracle train’s punctual arrival.
It takes courage to predict something a whole year ahead in a country where notoriously everything is postponed at the last minute – the deadline for paying your taxes, for submitting your thesis, for applying for a professorship. Looking around you as you cross the sterilised space of the empty piazza and enter the complex building site that the station has become (as I write, work on the metro station approach has been interrupted because the company that won the contract is accused of bribery and corruption), picking your way among the immigrants selling fake designer bags, ducking the little helicopters that Arab vendors launch into the air, avoiding the soap bubbles that two Slav men are squirting from ingenious little machines you wish had been around when you were a kid, averting your gaze, perhaps, from a body under newspapers against a pillar or an ancient woman sitting in her piss selling lapsed pharmaceutical products spread out on a filthy blanket, you can’t help wondering if high-speed rail travel is really society’s most pressing concern right now.
The truth is that every major Italian city rail station – Naples, Rome, Florence, Turin – is a daily challenge to the middle-class commuter’s propensity for denial: will we be able to ignore the spill of humanity leaking into our cosy Italian world from all over the planet? Can we really reassure ourselves that it’s none of our business that these men, women and children wrapped in sacking on the pavement are not our neighbours? Most days, I must say, we rise pretty well to the challenge. We have our iPods, our mobiles. We can walk past the starving to the melodies of Beethoven or the bluster of Bruce Springsteen. Perhaps what has most changed since 2005 are the rising tides of the dispossessed, the unemployed and the unemployable, and the ever more sophisticated technology that helps us not engage with them, to get from A to B faster and faster without touching anything dirty in between.
In this regard, the glittering monolith outside Milano Centrale is definitely on the side of denial. It raises your eye from the feckless press at ground level. ‘High speed bringing people together,’ says a pious promotion, ‘for a more united Italy.’ You can look away from the sprawling bodies and feel virtuous doing so. Only 150 days now. Only 100. We will be able to travel faster and faster – up to 250 miles per hour – in luxury, seeing less and less of the landscape as we shoot by, paying prices high enough to exclude those in need of charity.
Talking about luxury and prices, on the western side of the piazza, the side where the Arabs and Africans hang out, is the five-star Meridien Gallia Hotel, a dozen storeys of pompous 1930s extravagance. Once, my Italian publisher put me up there for the night. What was he thinking of? No sooner was I in my room than a waiter brought a bottle of champagne, courtesy of the house. Looking around, I saw that every luxury was at my fingertips, things I couldn’t even convince myself I wanted, the fluffy slippers, fresh bathrobe, a jacuzzi, polished marble surfaces, linen sheets, quality soaps. I didn’t really feel like champagne but opened the bottle anyway and drank, gazing out through the excellent double glazing of crystal-clean windows to where brown men were kicking a ball back and forth in the shadow of Centrale. I might perfectly well have been watching them on television. Shaking my head, I mimed a
