I asked them what they thought about the idea of a three-mile bridge over the Strait of Messina to link Sicily directly to the mainland. This is a grandiose project dear to Berlusconi when he was in office; he always loved to pull it out when he wanted to appear as a man of vision, a man who gets important things done. ‘It’s not unfeasible,’ I said. ‘There are any number of far longer bridges in the world. Why leave Sicily without a bridge? If the bridge carried trains as well it would revolutionise travel here.’
My hosts smiled as one does when humouring a child. It wasn’t a question, they said, of being for or against the bridge – who wouldn’t want such a thing? – as of simply knowing that no bridge would ever happen. It wouldn’t be allowed to happen.
‘They’re digging endless tunnels under the Alps,’ I objected, ‘at vast expense, not to mention all the viaducts they built for the high-speed Milan–Rome line.’
‘Precisely. Milan–Rome, Turin–Lyons; not Palermo, not Sicily.’
‘Sicily is abandoned!’
There; someone had said it.
‘So where is il professore Parks headed for tomorrow,’ someone wanted to pin me down, ‘so early in the morning?’
‘Crotone.’
There was a sharp, general intake of breath. Crotone is on the Calabrian coast, but not on the Sicilian side, the toe, but over towards the Gulf of Taranto, which begins the instep of the famous Italian boot.
‘But why? Why not Reggio? Why not Catanzaro? They’re near enough.’
Because I’d been to Reggio twice before. Because I didn’t have enough time to go everywhere, and because the ten-hour, twenty-minute journey with three train changes, a ferry and a bus link should push the efficiency of the rail service to the limit.
‘Ten and a half hours to go two hundred and fifty miles,’ one of the ladies said with a laugh.
‘Two hundred and eighty,’ I corrected.
Then in determined chorus all these good Sicilians told me there was no way; there was no way at all that the Ferrovie dello Stato could get me to Crotone in a single day. It was unthinkable. It wasn’t a major route. I was crossing Calabria, where everybody else was just going up or down the coast. Calabria was even less efficient than Sicily. They were very clear about this. Much less efficient. The famous Internet that I put so much faith in might say I could get to Crotone, but out of friendship they had to warn me that this was fantasy. I’d end up sleeping in a station, getting mugged or something worse.
‘Let’s make a bet,’ I said. ‘I will prove you wrong.’
Chapter 6
CROTONE–TARANTO–LECCE
DESPITE MY CONFIDENCE over dinner, I have to confess that it was with some genuine trepidation that I began my trip to Crotone. The only news I had of the place was negative. The abandoned chemical works north of the town was supposedly one of the great eyesores of the south. It was also famous, infamous, for one of the worst scandals of toxic waste dumping, 350,000 tons of zinc, lead, arsenic, mercury and the like. On the other hand, Crotone, I knew, had also been one of the great centres of Magna Grecia. Some 2,700 years ago, driven by local conflicts and shortages, the desire for adventure, ambition and no doubt greed, small groups of men and women set out from the various Greek cities to form a string of colonies on the Italian coasts of Calabria and Puglia. Fighting among themselves, dominating the indigenous peoples, thriving on trade, exporting grain and all kinds of artisan work and sculptures back to their communities of origin, these colonies eventually grew so large and wealthy, so cultured and accomplished, as to think of themselves as greater than Greece itself, hence the term that they themselves seem to have coined of Magna Grecia. Crotone in particular, twenty times winners of the Olympic Games in the fourth and fifth centuries BC, second only in that regard to Sparta, had been home to a huge temple to Hera built on a promontory reaching eastwards back across the sea to Hellas, their home. It is curious, with all the admiration heaped on ancient Greece in our schools and universities, that so little mention is made of Magna Grecia; and it was going to be fascinating, I thought, to see how the remnants of that old glory squared with the rare and ugly news that leaks out of the place today.
After first begging me to extend my stay in Modica, with an intensity that had me wondering if there might not be an attempted kidnap, Giuseppe, my hotelier, then insisted on having an early breakfast with me and driving me down to the station at the bottom of the town. When we arrived, he showed an almost childish eagerness to come in and explore the ticket office and the platform, as if this were some kind of oversized toy. The ticket window, a lattice of wood and frosted glass dating back to the fifties by the looks of it, was no longer in operation, having been replaced, as everywhere else, by a smart, new, credit-cards-only machine. Beside this was one of those weighing scales they used to put in stations before people could afford bathroom scales at home. I challenged Giuseppe to think of something less useful in a provincial railway ticket office, but he rightly pointed out that it did once have a use: there was a yardstick on the side of the machine that allowed you to measure your height. The state had used the railways to encourage people to check their weight in relation to their height. Were they malnourished? Were they obese? It was part of a public health drive that had started with
