To describe the area outside the station as a piazza would be generous. It was a deserted car park of broken asphalt serving not so much the station itself as the low industrial buildings all around. A brown bus bearing the legend Ferrovie di Calabria had a very stationary if not abandoned look to it. There was no bus stop, no timetable, no explanation, no driver. I turned to take the one taxi parked at the station exit, only to see it accelerating away with a young black woman in the back, looking very smart in white and purple.
I began to walk towards town. To my left, against a cement wall topped with blue railings, a metal board had been mounted on an iron scaffolding, in the 1970s perhaps. The surface of the board was white and there was evidence that many years ago it might have carried useful information. At the top, what had once been a map was too drastically faded to make out anything at all, but beneath it – on the map’s legend perhaps – I did manage to read the words MUSEO, CHIESA, PALAZZO, CASTELLO, RESTI ARCHEOLOGICI. Appropriately, Crotone was referred to, in fancy letters at the top, by its ancient name, kroton. Only one tiny square of the whole twelve square feet of surface area was still coloured and vivid: the AGIP logo of Italian Petroleum, a black lion on a yellow background. Apparently, when the company had closed down its plant here, all useful relationship between town and station had been severed. I climbed a bridge over a stinking, stagnant creek on whose dark surface raw sewage was all too visible. Evening time and still thirty-four degrees. Benvenuto a Crotone. Maybe the Sicilians had been wrong about the trains, but I began to fear that they were right about Crotone.
YET AN HOUR LATER, I was a happy boy. After walking through some dispiriting outskirts, the old centre of the town was immediately intriguing, a honeycomb of alleys climbing up and around a steep conical hill, each thread of street criss-crossed above with drying laundry and inhabited below by folks lounging on chairs outside the heavy bead curtains that kept flies from their front doors. People were eating, drinking, smoking, playing cards, reading newspapers or simply checking things on their phones. Outside one door a TV had been brought down to the street. Elsewhere a man was sharpening knives on a grindstone he turned with pedals and a chain. At the top of the hill was a castle housing a museum of Greek and Roman artefacts, closed now but definitely something to look at in the morning. There was also a public library with the bizarre name of Biblioteca A. Lucifero. Most of all, on the far side of the hill, there was a warm sea to swim in. I hurried to my hotel to dump my bag.
I had booked into the Hotel Concordia, really the only hotel in the centre. Outside, on the wall beside a busy cafe, a stone plaque told me others had gotten here before me: George Gissing in 1897, Norman Douglas ten years later. Even before I established exactly where the entrance was, a voice boomed, ‘Benvenuto, Meester Parkus.’
‘Buona sera,’ I said.
‘You have booked with Booking dot-com.’
‘That’s right.’
Not only was I recognisable as English, but apparently the only Englishman around here must be Mr Parkus.
Watching life go by on the pavement outside his hotel, the proprietor had a paunch to show off and the air of the man who knows everything anyone could know about the square mile he lives in.
‘Where’s your car?’ he asked. ‘I came by train.’
That threw him.
‘I treni fanno schifo,’ he announced immediately – the trains stink – and as if fearing contamination he made a strange little gesture – a tic, perhaps – as though washing his hands.
I climbed a steep flight of stone steps, left my little backpack in the tiny room that the proprietor’s languid daughter assigned me to, and hurried out to take a swim as the sun sank behind the hills west of the town. The waterfront was a pleasant hum of cafes where mostly local beachgoers were grabbing an aperitivo before dinner. A small band was grinding out old covers, cheerfully enough. I swam a little way out to get a good view of the esplanade and rolled over on my back. The water is so calm in this part of the world that you can just float and breathe. I must say I felt immensely pleased with myself, pleased to have made it here, pleased that my Sicilian friends were as wrong about Crotone as they had been about the trains, pleased that in general the southerners were turning out to be far less threatening than I had imagined. My adopted country was bigger than I had thought, I realised, bigger than Verona and Milan, bigger than Florence and Rome. It stretched this far. I had travelled a long way and still hadn’t left home. Feet
