italy is not a country i’ve hitherto spent very much time thinking about (automatic mental categories, in neat bubbles: art treasures! the classics! italian writers! olive and lemon groves! coastlines! football-high-fashion-mafia-cannoli-milan-design-week-moving-on!); but tim parks is making me want to go on long train journeys all over the country. not because he is a peter mayle (far from it, and also precisely why i’m hooked — his first book on italy was apparently turned down by italian publishers precisely for not being the sort that would make tourists dream of (hence flock to) tuscany.)in my mind, i would take a long journey, without definite destination, going from one station to another, buying the next ticket to somewhere else only when i got there (the way one hops from link to link on wikipedia and ends up quite somewhere other than one started.) and not on the high-speed freccias. i’d like to get on the old-fashioned regionale trains which still have COMPARTMENTS, where on my journey i might meet numerous friendly and curious southern italian families with picnic baskets who will explain local history and politics to me while inviting me to share their bread (not speaking any italian, i realise this last is a bit of a delusion fuelled by a life of overindulgence on the r.b. sort of travelogue, but did I already mention be-still-my-heart COMPARTMENTS?)
Best of the Transparent Hummingbird