Tim Parks: Italian Neighbours: An Englishman in Verona

As the months pass and you continue to sit and sup, you will doubtless be approached by the ex-priest, Lorenzo, now converted to ecology and admirably determined to save Montecchio’s famous ditches. He will ask you to sign something and you will sign it. In the corner, old men are muttering over Verona’s relegation prospects; soon you will be able to talk about that too. After Mass on Sunday mornings (did I mention the tiny crucifix on the wall above the liquor?) it will be the eight widows who put two tables together and confabulate in low voices, forming, in winter, a wall of fur coats. Even they will begin to smile at you after a year or so, perhaps wondering how long your own wife will outlast you.

Maybe you spot your butcher, your greengrocer, your dentist. Somebody asks you if you can do a translation for them. They run a picture-frame company. No invoice required. For heaven’s sake. Somebody walks over to mention a friend who has failed his exam at the university a couple of times and needs a helping hand. ‘Perhaps you’ll remember the name if it’s you doing his oral.’ ‘Well, I’m afraid I shouldn’t really …’ ‘Virgilio, he’s called. Virgilio Gandini.’ Somebody else is having trouble with the American instruction manual to the sprinkler system for his lawn. And that somebody knows another somebody who could fix the wobbly bearings on your car …

It would be a foolish resident of Montecchio who did not at least occasionally pop into Pasticceria Maggia, a short-sighted newcomer who did not invest in at least a couple of years’ worth of cappuccini …

Coming out on that first occasion, the morning after the evening before, I remember we almost ran into two grinning young carabinieri sauntering in in their beautiful uniforms with the scarlet-striped trousers and white breast straps. Something that might have been an elongated black beer-can swung from a handsome belt, complete with trigger. A tall, dark girl appeared from the kitchen holding high two trays of cannoli and various other pastries; there were smiles, some relaxed flirtation. The barista minced. They ordered their cappuccini . Cigarettes were lit. One crouched down to chat to a little child, asked predictably: What is your name, where do you live? Nobody seemed at all concerned by the submachine-gun the other was fingering as he spooned sugar over his foam.

Outside, we found their small, dark blue 850cc Fiat van parked in the middle of the small road, blocking anyone who wanted to get by. A radio could be heard calling them with some urgency. Should we go back in to tell them? But no. They are having their cappuccino . They only have a few minutes before it’s aperitivo time. They wouldn’t want to be disturbed.

WITH ALL THAT unpleasant unpacking and sorting out awaiting us back at the flat, we might well have chosen to make a detour before returning to Via Colombare that morning. Anything to stave off the evil day. We would thus have discovered how, following the line of the hills coming down from the north, the village of Montecchio, grey-green with dust and heat, is crossed, crisscrossed, by perhaps a score of small, lively streams bubbling swiftly through stone and grass and following a complex system of sluices which divert the water to feed neglected sheep dips, duckponds, irrigation ditches and great flat scouring slabs at the bottom of broken steps where the occasional older woman can still be seen scrubbing her husband’s underwear with a soapstick. The through road from Verona thus corners sharply left, right and left again, as it gropes for the two key bridges that will allow it to continue on its way to the outlying village of Olivè. With all the dips and curves it takes in the process, the sudden widenings and narrowings, the canyon-high kerbs followed by treacherous gutters and unexpected cambers, this chameleon strip of tarmac confers upon the village a splendid sense of the haphazard ad hoc , as if the asphalt had been put down in thick fog to reach the scene of some emergency, or, more likely, festival.

Geography, we discovered, is immediately mystified in Montecchio. Paths cut this way and that. One watercourse flows over, beside, under another. House, factory, farm, supermarket, all stand next to each other, although higgledy-piggledy, or are even built one inside the shell of another. The most obvious routes are blocked by dikes or long stone walls. Apparently parallel streets mysteriously lose all contact with each other. So that for the first few weeks one feels a sense of admiration, even bewilderment at seeing how confidently and, above all, how fast, cars shoot through streets where, due to the lack of pavements, so many corners are blind. Such things as bollards are unknown of course, and certainly undesired. Only a memory of a white line haunts the thoroughfares like some sermon heard and ignored long before; with the result that the sharp bends and corners of the main street are viciously cut by motorists and cyclists alike, especially during siesta time when it is not generally supposed that anybody could be coming the other way.

Tyres screech between the narrow walls of a bridge and into the tight bend immediately afterwards. A Vespa swerves: the little boy sitting in front of his father has grabbed the handlebars. Wrists precariously interlocked, a fourteen-year-old on his motorino pulls a younger girl on her bicycle up the slope of a dike, finding time to rev and buzz his buzzer as he does so. Somehow, beneath it all, the sleepy, underlying, village serenity persists, is always there, but there to be constantly violated by this indomitable Dionysiac principle on wheels. Here comes a moped reared up for fifty metres on its back wheel, overtaken by a Porsche in second at forty, roaring past the new church straight into the vicious turn by the chemist’s. So that if Via Olivé was not in fact laid in a fog or a drunken stupor, one can only presume that it was conceived as a practice track for apprentice race drivers, stunt artists and other would-be suicides. All of which inevitably takes its toll of those heedless elderly cyclists in trilby and shirtsleeves, headscarf and blouse, who wind and wobble about one-handed as they clutch walking-stick, fishing-rod or shopping-bag. As so often in Italy, the picturesque is combined with a sharp edge of danger.

The first bridge, around which cars will be loosely parked for butcher, barber and cobbler, takes you over a dry flood-overflow ditch. Perhaps five metres deep, seven wide, and straight as a die for miles, this unfortunately necessary piece of engineering slices the village in half with a ribbon of brambly scrub, Coke-cans, bottles and other discarded trophies of summer nights. As we were to discover later, the fact that such a considerable obstacle has still only been bridged to one end of the village, is a matter of smouldering political recrimination in Montecchio. For us, that first morning, it merely meant that the bar was perhaps five minutes further away than it need have been.

Having crossed the ditch, you follow the road past the new church, past a single AGIP petrol pump, perfectly at home beside a handsome stone arch, and arrive at the second bridge. More attractive than the first, this spans a tiny river, the Fibbio, which flows beneath windows and balconies, linking ponds where men stand fishing under NO FISHING signs, taking the mountain rains southwards toward the Adige, the Po, the Adriatic.

Returning from the bar that morning, we doubtless turned left here to follow the stream a little way to its source, since this was also the direction for Via Colombare. And so would have made our second delightful discovery of the morning: at the bottom of a little dead-end, not two hundred yards from our new flat, a great battered water-wheel was thrashing away in magnificent dereliction. The discovery was all the more welcome when we found that, standing on a little bridge a few yards downstream of the wheel, the air was mercifully cooler, sparkling with bright droplets, damp and breezy.