Italian Ways: On and Off the Rails from Milan to Palermo

Sean Wilsey

David Lodge

Tom Vanderbilt

Rachel Donadio - New York Times

Andrea Lee - newyorker.com

Alexander Aciman - The Daily Beast

Brigitte Frase - Minneapolis Star Tribune

Richard Eder - Boston Globe

Micahel Upchurch - Seattle Times

Marjorie Kehe - Christian Science Monitor

Ben Downing - Wall Street Journal

Chloë Schama - Smithsonian

The New York Times Book Review - Liesl Schillinger

Publishers Weekly

Ben Downing - The Wall Street Journal

David Shields

Liesl Schillinger - New York Times Book Review

Alexander Stille - New York Review of Books

John Lloyd - Financial Times

Mark O’Connell

Kirkus Reviews

The Barnes & Noble Review

Tim Parks, Englishman, novelist, memoirist, essayist, translator, and teacher, has been living in Italy for over thirty years. A considerable part of that time has been spent on trains and, as an adjunct, in mastering the country's byzantine canons of ticketing. In fact, one does not get far in Italian Ways: On and Off the Rails from Milan to Palermo before getting a good idea why this fine writer — shaped as he was by an Anglo- Saxon, commonsense view of the world and afflicted with a congenital streak of impatience — suffered for so many years from appalling tension-related pain in his vital parts (described in macabre detail in his Teach Us to Sit Still, 2010). The task of getting the right ticket in the appropriate form stamped correctly for the proper species of train going where you, too, would like to go involves the sort of rigmarole of which anxiety dreams are made and demonstrates as clearly as anything else in these engaging pages that, as Parks puts it, "Italy is not a country for beginners."

The taxonomy of the trains and the casuistry of their ticketing take up a good many of the book's pages — too many, you might begin to think, until you see that without entering into these mysteries you can't properly enjoy the vexations created by the intricacies and non sequiturs of the regulations. Indeed, so arcane is the science of purchasing the correct ticket from an Italian automatic ticket machine that it has spawned a small industry for Slav children who hang about, helpfully officiating over the complex ceremony for a small tip. Nor could you fully appreciate the changes being wrought to advance the global segregation of rich and poor (who had previously been treated as if they "actually belonged to the same species").

Trenitalia, the state-run system, and its trains have changed over the years — for better and for worse — as explained in ferocious, often amusing detail by Parks. Trenitalia's trains are now divided into the Interregionale or Regionale, designated unfondly by our guide as "the train of the living dead;" the express Intercity; the high-speed Eurostar; and the ultra-high- speed Freccia, which, itself, comes in two expressions of swiftness: Frecciarossa (200 mph) and the Frecciargento (150 mph). Not only does the whole system run at a mounting loss, but money has been taken from regional service and put into building the infrastructure for the ultra-high-speed trains serving wealthy people whose time is, presumably, more valuable and whose destinations are more important. This, of course, is the way of the world in the twenty-first century; but as with everything Italian, there is an entertaining exception to the preferred treatment given to the well heeled. Unlike in the U.S., where the privileges of private enterprise trump the necessities of public service, the new privately owned ultra- high-speed train, Italo, is made almost impossible to find and difficult to board, as a way of nobbling competition with Trenitalia.

Parks, who has an unmistakable taste for dualities, finds them everywhere in Italy, not least in the railway system — as good a place as any to fulfill his goal of capturing "the Italian way of doing things." In the first place, the railway both unites the country as a nation and "allows it to remain fragmented." Italy, he points out, is still essentially a collection of city-states whose citizens find a primary identity in their hometowns, places where they insist on living no matter where they may work or attend university. The result is a nation of heroic commuters living "double lives."

Strangely, for a book set in Italy, this one has little time for food — except in the form of laments over vanishing graciousness in its service for travelers — or for living arrangements, scenery, and the rhythm of days. The world outside stations, platforms, and railway carriages only becomes a real presence once Parks ventures to the South, a part of Italy that he, as a resident of Verona and like most northerners, knew little. ("The South is always present to us as an idea — a bad one.") His trip — from Rome down the coast, over to Sicily and back, hitting the instep at Crotone and the heel at Lecce — is a journey into both the past and an abortive future. Instead of encouraging tourism, the region opened itself to brute industry, now failed or environmentally disastrous. Traveling up by train from Crotone, Parks gives us a passenger's-eye view of the South:

Beaches. Bleached-white riverbeds. Mile after mile of olive groves. The Gulf of Taranto, empty sand with clear blue seas. Kiwi plants, row after endless row of them. Field after field. Broken walls. Stazione do Torre Melissa. Vineyards. Promontories with gray rock against blue sea. Stazione di Cirò. The capotreno's whistle. An ancient tower on a low hillside. Squat, square masonry. Abandoned factories. Cactuses and scorched grass. Stazione de Crucoli. Graffiti: 'Ti penso sempre, amore mio.' "

Reviewer: Katherine A. Powers