Standing on platforms in Brindisi, Lecce, Taranto, observing a few of these scenes, I suddenly felt that it was a disgrace that in thirty years in Italy I had spent so little time in the south. And I felt it was a conspiracy of the north that had held me back. But also the testimony of those very children, so often my students, who when they arrive in Milan shrug their shoulders and tell you that you really don’t need to make that journey, there is nothing there, in the south. This is my future, they tell you. The north. Yet of course many must go back. Or where would those mothers and fathers on the platforms come from? Perhaps they lose their enthusiasm for the north after they have graduated from my care. Perhaps Milan and Turin wear them down, or they find a state job in teaching and have themselves transferred to some school near home. They say you can live well on a state income in the south.
WHAT THEY DIDN’T TELL me in particular about the south was how remarkable these old city centres are. I don’t mean architecturally, or not only. There are remarkable city centres architecturally all over Italy. But socially, anthropologically. In Taranto and Bari there are large medieval towns just a stone’s throw from the train station, still mostly ungentrified, populated by a working class, almost an underclass, that speaks its own incomprehensible dialect and enjoys a sense of community and intense collective identity lost in most of Europe. Walk down a short road lined with palm trees from the station in Taranto, cross the swing bridge that divides the so-called Little Sea, to the left, from the Gulf of Taranto to the right, and you are already in an extraordinary world of suffocatingly narrow streets and people who don’t seem to make much distinction between being inside or outside, sitting on kitchen chairs in alleys watching their own TVs through the window in rooms whose walls are rough, bare stones piled up centuries ago. Men and women call to each other along the streets with distinctive cries, coded whistles, a fluid repertoire of gestures. At once you are on the alert; you sense this is not your place; you really are a stranger here, a stranger under observation through the cracks between shutters. Taking a photo, you take care not to offend, not to intrude, hopefully not to be seen.
The proximity of the train hasn’t changed this, or hasn’t destroyed it. True, the train sucks away the sons of these families, too, not to my university classes in Milan maybe, but to the factories of Frankfurt, Cologne and Dortmund. Instead of taking money from home to study, they send money back home. These are the kind of migrants who return on retirement; who in a sense never left and never wanted to leave.
Another kind of train that regularly leaves Taranto, though never announced in the station, is the freight train from ILVA, the huge steelworks on the coast of the Little Sea, a large internal lagoon in full view of the city. Built in 1961 when the steel industry was under state control, its location absolutely a matter of politics rather than any commercial logic, an attempt to bring work to the south and secure the votes of a grateful community, ILVA is now reputedly the largest steelworks in Europe and certainly by far the largest in Italy. I watched trains carrying huge black steel tubes, three to a wagon, bound who knows where. But only days after my visit, magistrates served an order to close the plant down, with a criminal charge of disastro ecologico. The pollution blowing across the Little Sea into Taranto is all too visible. A study claims that the steel industry here has been responsible over the past seven years for 11,550 deaths from respiratory conditions and heart disease. It’s not clear yet whether the plant really will close. One suspects not. One might as well say goodbye to half the Italian steel industry. In any event, it’s likely that in the near future the trains will be taking more and more men and less and less steel northwards to Germany. There will be more tearful farewells on the platforms.
IN GENERAL BRINDISI WAS a wonderful surprise, a busy port town with ferries to Greece and Croatia, not otherwise on anyone’s tourist itinerary, but undeservedly so; the centre is elegant and well signposted, while my hotel actually honoured me with a proper receipt. As so often, an easy, well-signposted movement between station and town is an indication that the local authorities are paying attention. One thing they’ve chosen to overlook in Brindisi, though,
