What we are dealing with here is an ongoing Italian dilemma. Are we ‘part of Europe’ or not? Are we part of the modern world? Are we progressive or backward? Above all, are we serious? There is a general perception that the Italian way of doing things, particularly in the public sector, is sloppy and slow, compromised by special interests and political considerations; hence an enormous effort must be made to work against the Latin grain and emulate a Teutonic punctuality, an Anglo-French high-tech.
This unease goes right back to the making of the Italian state. It is there in the patriot D’Azeglio’s famous line, ‘We have made Italy, now we must make the Italians.’ It is there in Mussolini’s obsession that ‘our way of eating, dressing, working and sleeping, the whole complex of our daily habits, must be reformed’. To make the trains run on time would be proof that Fascism had achieved this, that a profound change had occurred in the national psyche. ‘Abassa la vita commoda!’ proclaimed one Fascist slogan. Down with the easy life! You can understand why elections could hardly be free and fair when the main political party was fielding slogans like that.
But at another level, and quite understandably, Italians have no desire at all to change. They like an easy life. They consider themselves superior to those crude and fretful nations who put punctuality before style and comfortable digestion. A compromise is sought in image. Italy will be made to look fast and modern. There will be FastTicket windows even if they make the process of buying tickets more complex and anxiety-ridden than before. At the main station in Milan a member of the railway staff has now been given the task of vetting those who stand in the queue at the SportelloVeloce. ‘What train are you getting, signore? When does it leave?’ But how do we know if the reply a passenger gives to this official is the same as the request he will make at the ticket window? A problem of overmanning is solved, a new job invented, but the gap for the furbo remains open.
SUDDENLY I BECOME AWARE that there is a man sitting at one of the five ticket windows that was previously closed. A man in uniform. I’m second in the queue now. The man sits there quietly, unobtrusively. He has just started his shift. He looks at the queue where people are anxiously focused on the windows that are busy. He scratches an unshaven neck and turns the pink pages of his Gazzetta dello Sport. He is not shirking work, but he is not inviting it either. He has reading material.
I nudge the man in front: ‘That window’s free.’ He looks at me suspiciously, as if I were trying to get him out of the way to grab the next free window. ‘Are you open?’ he calls before committing himself. The man raises his eyes to gesture to the electronic display at the top of his window. ‘It says open, doesn’t it?’ As a result, just a few minutes later, I find myself going to the window hidden behind the pillar, where I discover that my one-time neighbour Beppe is serving.
Fifteen years ago Beppe gave up a promising and remunerative life as a freelance electrician to take up the dull job of serving at the ticket windows in Verona Porta Nuova. He had applied for the job when temporarily unemployed some years before; he survived a long and complex admissions process and served his time on a waiting list of some scores of men and women. When, years later, the call finally came, it was an opportunity his wife and parents wouldn’t let him pass up: a meal ticket for life. This is how a railway job is seen. It is decently paid and as irreversible as a place in paradise. In the 1960s there was even the suggestion that railway jobs should be made hereditary, a return to the medieval estates. This might seem laughable, but when most Italians in prominent positions seem to be the children of others in similar positions, when the multitude of small family companies that make up the most dynamic part of the Italian economy are generally passed on from father to son, or indeed daughter at a pinch, one can understand why the unions felt this arrangement could be introduced for an elite group of workers like the railway men.
Another friend of mine, a young man who once specialised in making handmade harpsichords, gave up his little workshop to become a railway carpenter repairing vandalised carriage fittings. Peer pressure to make these sad decisions is considerable. Job security is placed beyond every other consideration. Beppe, I know, finds his work at the ticket window desperately tedious but hangs on with bovine good humour. ‘These are hard times,’ he says, though one of the hardest things these days is finding an electrician in a hurry. Handmade harpsichords are not widely available either.
‘An annual season ticket to Milan,’ I tell him.
‘Interregionale, Intercity or Eurostar?’ Beppe asks.
I explain that I take the Interregionale going but as often as not an Intercity coming back.
My old neighbour shakes his head, rubs his chin in his hand. ‘Complicated.’
In the early 1990s, as part of an urgent effort to make the railways lean and mean, or at least not quite so bonnie and bountiful, the Ferrovie dello Stato (FS) were officially split off from government control and obliged to return, if not a profit, then certainly not much of a loss. However, since the government continued to own more than half the company’s shares and to regulate every aspect of company policy, stipulating what lines it was obliged to run with what regularity and at what fares, the move was little more than, well, a formality. Then in the late nineties, to fall in line with European legislation on competition in the transport sector, the monolithic company was
