Italian Ways by Tim Parks

Author:Tim Parks
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House

Part Three

TO THE END OF THE LAND

2012

Chapter 5

MILANO–ROMA–PALERMO

I’M SCARCELY SURE what nationality I really am these days. All I know is that for the past thirty years I’ve lived and worked in northern Italy, and like most of the people around me I know little of the south, though the south is always present to us as an idea – a bad one, for the most part. The news we get of the south does not endear it to us. It is Gomorrah, it is corrupt, it soaks up our tax money, and when it isn’t corrupt it is superstitious, primitive, sentimental, saccharine. In Milan the presence around us on the streets and in the workplace of all the southerners who have escaped to come to a serious place to work only confirms our opinions. And having made the journey north, these southerners are understandably eager to convince themselves they have done the right thing; they rarely speak affectionately of their home without a certain sigh that reminds you that, much as they love it, it was impossible to stay. The fact that so many politicians are southerners doesn’t help; Italian politicians rarely inspire confidence. So when a northerner travels south he does so more often than not with a slight sense of trepidation, as if entering a different zone – a different country, even. I remember once, when travelling to see Hellas Verona play in Naples, as the train drew to a standstill beside police lined up with batons, an older fan warned me, ‘We use our fists, they have their knives.’

But all of a sudden, I had an urge to head south. Perhaps it was the 150th anniversary of Italian unity in 2011 that started it. During the celebrations people in Milan and Verona just could not have been less interested, never mind festive. The Northern League, a powerful xenophobic and separatist faction in northern Italy, was depicting Garibaldi as a bandit, a terrorist, whose 1860 expedition with the glorious Mille to capture Sicily and the south had merely saddled the north with an unwanted burden and a constant source of cultural contamination. Everybody was talking federalism and autonomy. At the same time, David Gilmour’s book The Pursuit of Italy was making waves. Gilmour’s learned conclusion is that the Risorgimento was a huge mistake and that Italy would govern itself better if split up once more into a dozen city states. Frankly, I think that this is a complete misreading, a text-bound academic’s misreading, of Italian quarrels, like the friend who imagines a couple should split because they quarrel and talk about splitting. The truth is, you know the Italians are a people because the way they argue with each other is quite different from the way they argue with foreigners. It is their way of being together. Gilmour also underestimates a current of national idealism that runs beneath the surface of Italian cynicism. Garibaldi embodied that idealism. I for one have benefited enormously from the legacy he

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