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

by Tim Parks

Or could the difference between the way things were then and the way they are now be used to show something that has always fascinated me: how national character manifests itself most clearly when the things you thought couldn’t change finally do.

It is there in Mussolini’s obsession that ‘our way of eating, dressing, working and sleeping, the whole complex of our daily habits, must be reformed’. To make the trains run on time would be proof that Fascism had achieved this, that a profound change had occurred in the national psyche.

In every aspect of Italian life, one of the key characteristics to get to grips with is that this is a nation at ease with the distance between ideal and real. They are beyond what we call hypocrisy. Quite simply they do not register the contradiction between rhetoric and behaviour. It’s an enviable mindset.

This leads inevitably to the reflection that the person who is just passing through is always a second-class citizen in Italy.

Nothing is more obsolete than yesterday’s vision of the future.

As ever in Italy, the acknowledged lawlessness of the country’s ruling class offers an excellent alibi for smaller offenders. One of the reasons for endlessly voting for corrupt politicians is that your own misdemeanours seem trivial by comparison.

Deep down we all know that the rules are invented precisely to create the conditions for these confrontations, and when they occur they are immensely more important than merely checking that people have paid their fare or, in my case, reading some novel.

Her companion remarked that Wind Jet was run by Antonino Pulvirenti, who also owned the Catania football club and the whole Forté empire.

Giuseppe agreed: ‘The state likes to pretend it’s present when it isn’t. They like to behave as if Sicily were like the rest of Italy and everything were under control. It isn’t. And, of course, through the railways they can hand out a few jobs, which wins them votes.’

Modern Italian genius is largely about inhabiting the past in a way that makes sense and money.

They say that Gothic novels came into being because science and eighteenth-century rationalism were threatening to empty the world of any romance, spirituality or caprice.