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

by Tim Parks

It is there in the patriot D’Azeglio’s famous line, ‘We have made Italy, now we must make the Italians.’

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.

And it’s amazing how rarely the eye lifts when you are commuting. ‘Each man fixed his eyes before his feet,’ T. S. Eliot said of the crowd flowing over London Bridge.

as if the material world had been suspended and I were entirely in the realm of the mind.

we are simultaneously well off and not well off; we deserve excellent services but we are already paying too much for them; we are confident and hard done by.

Isn’t this what it means to be bourgeois, after all? A state of mind invented in Florence in the fifteenth century: the virtuous, forgivably self-satisfied businessman.

But there was something deeper: this whole culture of ambiguous rules, then heated argument about them without any clear-cut result, seems to serve the purpose of drawing you into a mindset of vendetta and resentment that saps energy from every other area of life.

The Italians invariably produce these monolithic organisations, the Catholic Church, the Ferrovie dello Stato or indeed the state itself, that they both identify with and feel hostile to.

The map is not the territory, as the philosopher Alfred Korzybski famously said.

Tomorrow it’ll be too late for regrets.

Thirty years ago I surrendered my identity, my Britishness. I became this strange hybrid, neither here nor there. Between places, between cultures. Recognised everywhere as English, but not really English now.

The train station is the ideal scenario for greetings and farewells.

If the whole of railway technology, the whole cultural and architectural heritage that is the Italian railway station, had been designed on purpose to maximise the emotional drama of return from afar, it could not have been done better.

If one wants to see everything historically important in Italy one will never get home at all.

On the other hand, if there was a train to the end of the land, I should take it.

Everywhere you are aware of commerce satisfying appetite in an atmosphere of easy hedonism.

The truth is that you can’t visit the past.

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

Stepping down from the carriage, I have a feeling I have returned from furthest margins to the throbbing heart, the centre whose commercial energy keeps the whole body alive and breathing.

you don’t attach to it, in pleasure or in aversion. ‘Just observe,’ the teacher tells you, ‘just observe life as it is, not as you would wish it to be, as it is.’

The mind likes to move on rails,

I thought of the earth under the sleepers and the flesh beneath these thoughts; I tried to conceive of the meeting point where the steel weighs down on the soil, and the idea meshes with a tangle of nerves and veins and in your head the train of thought rattles by with a shrill whistle.

Travelling by train means sharing a common fate; we are on this journey together, as the meditators at the retreat share their silent journey together through the long hours of the day; a journey to no particular destination. We know we will not reach enlightenment.