Or – since there is no end to conspiracy theory once you’ve begun – perhaps rather than guaranteeing that everybody pays for their ticket every time they travel, the idea was to open up new opportunities for fining passengers: if you don’t have your ticket stamped you’re liable to a fine – €50 or so – even if you merely forgot to have it stamped. Since there is no barrier in Italian stations between ticket purchase and platforms – nothing to remind you, that is, of your duty to have the ticket stamped – forgetfulness is understandable, especially for tourists who don’t know the ropes and perhaps are not in the habit of reading the small print on their tickets carefully.
My mother had to pay up some years ago. She was travelling with a friend. You can imagine them: two pale English pensioners in flowery dresses on the line from Florence to Siena. They hadn’t realised they were supposed to have their tickets stamped. My evangelical mother is the least likely person in the world to try to avoid a fare. Probably this was the only time in her eighty-odd years that she has fallen foul of the law. Certainly it was the only time she ever had to pay a fine. She felt deeply shamed. The inspector was remorseless: ‘You foreigners always pretend you don’t understand,’ he said.
But no law in Italy is ever quite watertight, let alone rigidly applied. There are always interesting loopholes. For example, if I forget to have my ticket stamped, or am unable to do so because the stamping machines are not working (an occurrence so common as to be the norm in some small stations), all I have to do is inform the ticket inspector before boarding the train and he will write the time and date on the ticket with his pen, and sign it, and I will be forgiven and allowed to travel without paying a fine. The inspector – who may or may not also be the capotreno, the train manager – can generally be found at the door to one of the carriages towards the back of the train, one foot on the platform, the other raised self-importantly on the footplate, waiting to blow his whistle and wave his green cap to tell the driver to close the doors.
Once, riding an Intercity with my Interregionale season ticket, I realised I had forgotten to have my supplement stamped, priced at €4.23. Immediately anxious, I jumped off at the small station of Peschiera, but there was no stamping machine in sight on the platform, so, seeing the ticket inspector already raising his whistle to his lips, I ran to him and asked if he would convalidate (is this a word?) my ticket. He refused. He said he could see from my ticket that I had already been on the train and hence was liable to a fine. I pointed out that now that I had got off the train I could stay off and hence avoid a fine. He could hardly fine me if he didn’t catch me on the train and I was clearly not intending to cheat if I had jumped off the train to have my ticket stamped.
We argued. It is extraordinary how regularly Italy creates these areas of uncertainty: how is the law to be applied? Whole personalities form around such complications. The furbo, of course, will try to get around every rule. But there is also the opposite figure, the pignolo, someone who will apply the rules most determinedly, even when, or perhaps especially when, they are the most inappropriate. The pignolo always believes that everybody else is furbo, the furbo that everybody else is pignolo.
‘I shall refuse to pay the fine if you try to fine me,’ I told the ticket inspector.
‘I will report you to the on-board police,’ he declared. There are usually two carabinieri or poliziotti, armed to the teeth, on every train.
‘The on-board police are on board,’ I told him. ‘And I am not.’
Once again he refused to ‘convalidate’ my ticket.
Meanwhile, the Venice–Turin Intercity was being held up. Perhaps a thousand passengers.
Feeling belligerent, I got on the train anyway. ‘It’s clear that I’m in good faith,’ I declared.
‘The rules don’t say anything about good faith,’ he said. This is true. Italian rules and regulations never consider the question of the spirit in which one has behaved. He was going to fine me and that was that.
But though I sat in the same carriage all the way to Milan, he never came to fine me. Perhaps it was only important to have me worried, to assert an authoritative presence. The tax office has also done this to me. They threaten, then don’t do anything. Since the inspector didn’t stop by to put the date on my ticket, I was able to use my supplement a second time. And I did!
A similar situation once occurred when I travelled to Gorizia, on the Italian–Slovenian border. The inspector examined my ticket with some care and told me that this ‘document’ required me to travel through Pordenone rather than through Udine. I had gone the long way round, he accused. There was a difference of some twenty miles to pay, plus a fine.
The man at the ticket window had told me nothing about this, I protested. I just asked for a ticket to Gorizia and consulted the time-table and got on the most suitable train.
