Tim Parks - Italian Neighbours - An Englishman in Verona

In need of air, we rolled up plastic slat shutters and walked out on to the main terrace balcony into the luminous, breathless heat of the evening. Across the street, in front of an older peasant house with fine pink stucco, a group of people our own age were laughing, drinking, smoking and playing table tennis under a fluorescent tube whirring with moths, strung up between two tall cypresses. In the street, despite the hour, their numerous children kicked a football amongst the cars, including our own, bicycles still on top, strips of chrome hanging off the sides. We sat on the arms of an old armchair that Uncle or Aunty Patuzzi had abandoned out here to make a home for spiders and provide the stuff of birds’ nests. The sharp tock-tocking of the ping-pong ball, the laughter of adults and children, the background whirring of crickets, was not unpleasant. And would have been pleasanter still with a glass of chilled white wine in our hands. That was something to look forward to. Walking to the far end of the balcony, we saw a young man manoeuvring his sober blue Lancia into a makeshift garage of corrugated iron and breeze block. Then came the strains of the news programme from perhaps three or four open windows. What time was it, eleven o’clock? At midnight we could expect the first fresh stirring of the air. And we intended to be naked on the bed for that.

This has always been one of the pleasures of high summer here. You have been uncomfortably sticky all day. Maybe you’ve showered twice, tried shorts, long cotton trousers, T-shirts, tank tops, exchanged shoes for tennis shoes, tennis shoes for sandals, sandals for bare feet, had the fan on top speed blowing your papers about while you’re typing, sucked ice cubes, put your legs in a bucket of cold water, etc., etc., and nothing has worked. The heat seems to come from inside you. Comfort is unimaginable.

Naturally, you feel irritable. Towards evening, you look at the sky, listen to distant thunder, watch the heat lightning playing over low hills, and you know that it won’t rain; so often the elements put on this show just to tease. Going to bed you must decide: the open windows and the zanzare , the mosquitoes, or the closed windows and the heat. Inevitably, you opt for the mosquitoes, because in the end, at least around Verona, there aren’t that many.

You lie there naked. The idea of any superfluous contact with your body in the form of a sheet or pyjamas is unthinkable. Through a kind of breathy intimacy the summer darkness has, you listen to chatter, facetious variety shows, card games and music from other open windows; because nobody in the entire neighbourhood is asleep, nobody would dream of installing air-conditioning so as to be able to turn in at the normal time (and even mosquito nets are rare). Everybody is waiting for it to happen. Until at last, around midnight or shortly afterwards, like some good spirit suddenly moving across the face of the earth, or the touch of a lover’s finger dipped in cool water, the air stirs, it shifts, it breathes, and the notion of freshness becomes imaginable again. Almost immediately the sounds fade, the TVs snap off, the children cease to shriek and chatter, Via Colombare is falling asleep.

It was an hour or so later on this particular night that Vega began to bark. I am not exaggerating when I say of Vega that I have never heard another dog sound so deeply disturbed, so much an anima in pena , a tormented soul. She bayed, wailed, was at once furious and desperate. I remember asking Rita which circle of the Inferno we might be in.

The third or fourth time the beast woke up, I went out on to the tiny balcony of our bedroom at the back of the house away from the street. On a raised terrace not five yards away, the other side of a narrow canyon of garden between, a big golden labrador strained a long chain to paw at flaking shutters barring the back door of an old peasant house. It howled rather than barked, perhaps moaned rather than howled. And as I watched, enjoying the now cool night air on my skin, somebody threw something at the creature from an upper window, food perhaps, for the dog was immediately scrabbling excitedly among the terrace sweepings between a Cinquecento and an Alfetta.

Back in bed, the apparent relief of silence was shortlived. The insidious whine of a zanzara hovered just above our pillows. Up in a flash, light on, a dusty accountancy magazine of Patuzzi’s grabbed from the bedside table, within a minute I’d reduced the thing to a bright red spot of blood on the greying tempera wall. ‘Can AIDS be passed on by mosquitoes?’ the local paper had recently been alarming us.

‘I wonder, you know,’ I asked, coming back to bed, ‘I wonder if the yups and artsy guys and retired professors checking through estate agents’ lists of farmhouses in Tuscany have been adequately filled in on these details.’ My wife, who always seems ready for questions of this kind, remarked that first the weather was never this unpleasantly sultry in Tuscany, second that local dialects there were all more or less comprehensible, since they formed the basis of modern Italian, and third, and most convincingly, that anybody who could afford to buy a farmhouse in Tuscany need not have somebody else’s hunting dog breathing down their necks, and would doubtless have screen windows fitted before moving in. As far as we were concerned, however, she continued, there was just the small problem that we were not so fortunately placed vis-à-vis our bank accounts and, furthermore, that there were so many Brits in Tuscany that our linguistic skills would not be in the kind of demand that might allow us to pay a hefty rent.

‘Plus the fact’, she added, ‘ che tu porti iella . You bring bad luck.’

Only months later, when I took the liberty of saying the same thing to a business acquaintance, did I appreciate that such an accusation is one of the worst things an Italian can say to somebody. Had I known, we would doubtless have argued long into the night.

AM I GIVING the impression that I don’t like the Veneto? It’s not true. I love it. I’m going to tell you some wonderful things about it. When I’ve finished, I hope you’ll be wishing you’d been here too, at least for a little while. But like any place that’s become home, I hate it too. And, of course, you can’t separate the things you love and hate: you can’t say, let’s move to so and so where they have the cappuccini , the wines, the lasagna , the marvellous peaches, the handsome people in handsome clothes, the fine buildings, the close-knit, friendly secretiveness of village life, but not, please, the howling maltreated hunting dogs, the spoilt adolescents on their motorini , the hopeless postal service, the afa . You can’t do it. It’s a package deal.

In any event, the morning after our unnerving arrival, we set off to find the village bar /pasticceria and console ourselves with the pleasanter side of the arrangement, make ourselves known, see the lie of the land. And for anyone moving to Italy, this is a habit I really can’t recommend too warmly: frequent your local bar, and if possible bar /pasticceria ; frequent it assiduously, decorously, even religiously.

Timing is important. In general, if you want to order a cappuccino with brioche you should try to arrive before ten-thirty. Of course, you could still order the same things later, but this would be a declaration of your foreignness. And while Italians usually seem to like foreigners, the foreigners they like most are the ones who know the score, the ones who have caved in and agreed that the Italian way of doing things is the best. For this is a proud and profoundly conservative people, as careful observation of ordering at the bar will confirm. And a tightly knit one too. How is it that they all instinctively sense, without even glancing at stylish watches, that such and such a time is the moment to switch to their aperitivi ? How they chuckle and grin when a German orders a cappuccino rather than an espresso after lunch, pouring that milk on to an already full stomach. And here’s a curious detail: espresso is always OK, twenty-four hours a day, even corretto (i.e., with grappa ), but cappuccino has a very definite time slot: 8–10.30 a.m. Trivia? No, good training. When the full complexity of these nuances becomes apparent — because the digestivo , the gingerino , the prosecco all have their right times and contexts too — you will be less surprised by the labyrinthine process of, say, switching your driving licence to an Italian one or sorting out your position vis-à-vis the health system. There is an order to all things; follow it, even when it borders on the superstitious and ritualistic.