Italian Ways Quotes

“What a beautiful respite a train journey is and a good book, too, and best of all the book on the train, in life and out of it at the same time, before we arrive at Termini and disembark and the book is put down and we must all part and go our separate ways, forever.”
― Tim Parks, Italian Ways: On and Off the Rails from Milan to Palermo

“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 behavior. It’s an enviable mind-set.”
― Tim Parks, Italian Ways: On and Off the Rails from Milan to Palermo

“In America the lack of investment in train travel speaks eloquently of a country always ready to appear righteous but pathologically averse to surrendering car and plane for a more eco-friendly, community-conscious form of mobility.”
― Tim Parks, Italian Ways: On and Off the Rails from Milan to Palermo

“The train station is the ideal scenario for greetings and farewells. The car is too banal. What does it mean to set off in a car? Nothing. The airport is too exhausting and impersonal, the plane itself remote, unseen, the barriers and security disturbing. Here the powerful beast of the locomotive thrusts its nose under the great arch of the station.”
― Tim Parks, Italian Ways: On and Off the Rails from Milan to Palermo

“Nothing is more obsolete than yesterday’s vision of the future.”
― Tim Parks, Italian Ways: On and Off the Rails from Milan to Palermo

“it was through constructing a network of railways across some of Europe’s most arduous terrain that the newly formed Italian nation won a reputation for ingenuity and adventurous construction projects.”
― Tim Parks, Italian Ways: On and Off the Rails from Milan to Palermo

“So we had the classic Italian compromise, a theater of strife when all was actually agreed. Anarchy is rare in Italy, but legality is always up for renegotiation, especially if you can present yourself as hard done by,”
― Tim Parks, Italian Ways: On and Off the Rails from Milan to Palermo

“There are people who want to be on their own, to mark out their own territory and be quiet there, and there are people who are eager to invade that territory, to sit close to someone else.”
― Tim Parks, Italian Ways: On and Off the Rails from Milan to Palermo

“More than one person has claimed that the whole history of Italy as a nation-state could be reconstructed through an account of the country’s railways.”
― Tim Parks, Italian Ways: On and Off the Rails from Milan to Palermo

“It makes the nation possible and allows it to remain fragmented, allows people to live double lives.”
― Tim Parks, Italian Ways: On and Off the Rails from Milan to Palermo