Tim Parks: Italian Neighbours: An Englishman in Verona

Did we go on to the Laghetto Squarà that morning? I imagine we did. The little path behind the wheel would have been too inviting to ignore with anything more than an hour before lunch. It’s stony underfoot. There are tall, sagging fences to protect an extravaganza of peppers, aubergines, young tomato plants. Water is everywhere: tiny streams gurgling through the vegetable patches, the small river rushing at the millwheel, and to the right, through a Roman arch framing rusty silos, a stagnant pond with stone surrounds which presumably once had some industrial purpose. There are big blue dragonflies and livid green surface weeds. A scooter buzzes urgently at a blind corner, forcing one to step smartly aside, and then the path emerges into the open space of Laghetto Squarà

What happens here is that spring water rising beneath an abandoned seventeenth-century church flows out under its rotting door and bubbles across the path into a small square lake, the laghetto . There are tall plane and poplar trees around it, a stone embankment this side, and grassy banks the other, with three or four sluice gates. Moving to the edge, the glass clearness of the water allows you to look down two or three metres on to abandoned Roman building stones, pollution-fed weeds and that characteristic assortment of junk that people all over the world feel obliged to throw into attractive expanses of water: old tyres, a shoe, electrical appliances.

It’s sad. Despite the obvious attraction of Laghetto Squarà, nothing has been composed or finished, nothing appears to be tended or even cleaned. For this is the public sector, not the private commercial world of the bar. Indeed, it’s difficult to imagine the comune , the local government, having spent anything on the place in the last ten years, aside from paying someone to prune the surrounding trees with extraordinary ruthlessness (because paid, we later discovered, in the form of firewood procured).

Yet precisely because of this neglect, the laghetto hangs on to a quality it might lose with transformation into some modern notion of the recreational picturesque; it retains its weathered, rather haphazard air of simply, naturally being there. You sit by the waterside on a big square stone fished out from the bottom some years ago; there are faded Roman inscriptions on its bumpy surface, a date, a few letters suggesting the name of an emperor. Spring water chuckles over the shale path to your left; the hills are behind you; the lake, the busy village and the plain in front. ‘So,’ you think, ‘this is the water table, I am at the foot of the Alps.’ Kids throw themselves into the lake in their underwear. Girls scream, protesting they don’t want to be pushed. And maybe they don’t. It’s a little more comfortable here than back in the dusty streets. A lizard basks just a few inches from your foot, reminding you how long you’ve been sitting still. Montecchio, you feel, may turn out to be OK.

IT TOOK US two long, hot days. We made friends at Brandoli, the local supermarket, where three trips were required to accumulate the necessary boxes, and we moved a whole culture from Flat 3 up into the suffocating solaio below the roof.

Should we have paid more attention to what we were moving? Would I know more about Italy if I had read all the various diaries and letters with attention? Perhaps so. But old bric-à-brac, old clothes, old medicines, old shoes, old files, accounts, newspapers, rags, toiletries, shopping lists, votive items, paperbacks, military hats, jewellery boxes, camp cooking equipment and tins upon tins of assorted nuts, bolts and nails, have a very bad effect on my morale. Where another might find each item numinous with meaning, I feel overwhelmed by a sense of insignificance. I think of mountains and mountains of such relics multiplied by every household in every corner of the world — varying, of course, from country to country, each with its own cultural matrix, its own peculiar make-up, implying this value and that, but in the end just debris, life’s parings waiting to be thrown out — and all I want to do is to see the back of it all as fast as possible. I’d never make it in archaeology or anthropology. Thus, what I did save from our supermarket boxes for a moment’s examination, and what my memory and my wife’s now offer me in the way of details of that marathon clean-up, can only be scraps, clues, hints to the character, life and times of Umberto Patuzzi — or ‘ il professore ’ as we were later to come to think of him — and of his still vegetating wife, Maria Rosa. Had we known how intriguing these people were to become for us, we might have paid more attention.

Signora Marta had said her aunt and uncle were well travelled and, indeed, the gigantic frosted glass and peeling veneer cupboard in the salotto was stacked with sufficient tourist brochures to keep an agency going for a couple of months in high season: except that these brochures dated back ten, twenty, even forty years. The oldest, in alphabetically ordered piles, for the most part extolled cheap hotels in the local mountains or on the nearby Adriatic coast, with fragile brown-and-white photographs giving ample evidence of the fifties building spree. Tuscany, Elba, the Abruzzi, Rome and Sicily followed close behind, like pieces in a rapidly expanding and now colourful jigsaw — Technicolor seas and gaudy local delicacies — until, with the sixties boom, mass prosperity and the Italians’ love affair with the automobile , here came the first price lists for hotels in Austria, Switzerland, Yugoslavia. Pile after pile of them. The most recent and lavishly seductive exhibits featured the Azores, the Bahamas, pensioners’ package trips to Florida.

Clearly there was material for a couple of Ph.D.s in this cupboard but, nevertheless, straight into our Brandoli boxes it all went. We were in a hurry. An essay on holiday destinations as an expression of Italian economic development over the last three decades was not what we had in mind. Except that here, beneath the brochures, was a photograph album. Well, who can resist at least glancing at photographs?

Such was Patuzzi’s love of the road and his motor car, he must have had the habit of getting someone, presumably Maria Rosa, to snap him by exotic road signs (as others might want to record their presence at the top of mountains). So here he is, in black and white, full head of virile hair brushed back, thin aquiline, intelligent nose, arriving in Trento with stout climbing boots round his neck and a knapsack on his shoulders; he has the confident, satisfied look on his face of someone who has just been admired for making an intelligent remark, or at the very least has eaten a good lunch. Nineteen thirty-seven, says the spidery hand. And here he is again, in colour now, balding, but still sporty, in wool trousers and green anorak, by a sign that tells us ‘Wien’. We flick through page after page of these things: mountain villages, hotel billboards, autostrada exits; until finally, most recently and most extraordinarily, here is a much older, weathered, bent Patuzzi, leaning on a stick, by black lettering on a white road sign announcing ‘Praha’, with, beside him, and even more extraordinarily, a very recognisable Lucilla. That does put a new slant on things. More a ménage than a condominium perhaps? Could she even be right about ownership of the flat? Or am I jumping the gun?

Further back in the cupboard are some collectors’ items from the war days: an army hat, a school textbook (‘Describe your feelings — of admiration and gratitude — on contemplating a photograph of il Duce ’), and a stack of the macabre Signal magazines: tabloid-size, in German with Italian translations, these offer comic-strip propaganda, mainly directed against — well, against us . ‘ Bombe sull’Inghilterra !’ one enthusiastic piece is entitled. Is this, I sometimes wonder, why the young men in the bar still feel such rivalry? And what had friend Patuzzi done in the war apart from reading such heady stuff (later we learned that Lucilla had been begging for bread on the streets of Vicenza).