Tim Parks: Italian Neighbours: An Englishman in Verona

“Am I giving the impression that I don’t like the Veneto? It’s not true. I love it. But like any place that’s become home I hate it too.”

How does an Englishman cope when he moves to Italy — not the tourist idyll but the real Italy? When Tim Parks first moved to Verona he found it irresistible and infuriating in equal measure; this book is the story of his love affair with it. Infused with an objective passion, he unpicks the idiosyncrasies and nuances of Italian culture with wit and affection. Italian Neighbours is travel writing at its best.

Born in Manchester in 1954, Tim Parks moved permanently to Italy in 1980. Author of novels, non-fiction and essays, he has won the Somerset Maugham, Betty Trask and John Llewellyn Rhys awards, and been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. His works include Destiny, Europa, Dreams of Rivers and Seas, A Season with Verona and An Italian Education .

I often find it useful, or at least amusing, to think of a book in terms of a gesture, a mood, a posture. In which case the gesture of this book might be that of a busy but inexpert fellow dashing about the narrow confines of his territory waving a net on the end of a long stick. It’s not a butterfly net, by the looks of it. It’s altogether too big for that, huge in fact. But it might be a will-o’-the-wisp net. Which would explain the extremely fine silk mesh, the random way it is being waved. And if we were to ask this frantic fellow what particular species of will-o’-the-wisp he is after? He stops, out of breath, surprised at our interest. Well, some of the most common, he pants: national character, a sense of place, the feeling people, place and weather generate. And how is he getting on? He shrugs, pouts, as if to say, this is a mug’s game if ever there was one. Will-o’-the-wisps — you know — the thing is, even when you do catch one for a moment you have a terrible job recognising them, and then when you pin them on the pages of your book they immediately lose all colour and shape. Anyway, he is spending most of his time picking truisms, clichés and caricatures out of his net. Not to mention the mere grit and chaff the air is full of. You leave him to get on with it. He rushes off, apparently at random. And it seems that in his desperation he’s beginning to wield his net quite wildly, and perhaps in not altogether legitimate fashion, sweeping backwards in time when he ought to go forwards, allowing the fine fabric to fill with all kinds of things from moments years apart, and places, even dimensions, far from contiguous. You shake your head. Whatever it is that finally gets catalogued in his book, obviously this is not a man you’ll be able to trust on such imponderables as documentary authenticity.

HOW TO FORGET the day we arrived in Montecchio? How even to begin to describe the weather to someone who has not been in the Veneto in July? For the weather must surely have played its part in how things went.

We’re not talking about heat really. Or that’s only part of the problem. The temperature is maybe only 31 °C or 32, which is not impossibly hot. One has managed with 35 and more on beaches down south or in the mountains. But there is no sunshine with this heat today, no blue sky, no colour, no air. Above you — and it doesn’t seem very far above you either — is a uniform, oppressive, at once damp and gritty greyness, the sun only a suspicion somewhere, a blond thumbprint, a smudge. Nor is there the slightest inkling that this strange, simmering, spongy atmosphere is going to roll itself up into some kind of raincloud or liberating storm. There’s not a breath, not a whisper of wind.

You don’t notice it perhaps in the town, but as you leave Verona, heading east, you suddenly become aware how miserable visibility is. The hills immediately to the north whose cherry blossom you enjoyed so much in spring, the toothy peaks of the Alps beyond which were so dramatic in sharp and slanting winter light, have all disappeared. Perhaps you’re not seeing more than a couple of kilometres. And if — and God forbid — you were to turn south into the bassa padana itself, Po-bound across the open plain, you might well find, beyond Nogarole Rocca towards Mantua, a sort of brilliant grey heat fog, so dense the world will seem a haze and the other cars ghosts, and the vines and fruit trees and towering maize and tobacco plants one vast steaming minestrone of a landscape …

But we are going to Montecchio, which, like Verona itself, lies at the foot of those first now invisible hills that mark the beginning of the long climb up to the Alps. And, curiously, it is the Alps, you are always told, which are one of the guilty parties as far as this weather is concerned. But only in this sense: that they shut out the merciful winds that might otherwise blow away everything that makes the atmosphere in the plain so unpleasant: the slow accumulation of exhaust fumes, the exhalations of a thousand pig-and chicken-factories, and the abundant insecticides that hover and mingle in the stale air over what otherwise, or in other weather, would be scenes of exquisite beauty.

The local name for the whole phenomenon is afa — or lo smog (pronounced zzzmog). You pick your shirt away from armpits and feel uncomfortable about the crotch. The only thing close to it in British terms perhaps is a packed Friday afternoon rush hour on bus or tube when the Standard has taken up half its front page to tell you WHAT A SIZZLER!

But, just at the moment, we are travelling behind the rusty white Fiat 127 of our future landlady, our padrona di casa . We are going to see and hopefully move into a 110-square-metre flat in the outlying village of Montecchio. Hence our own car, an ageing tangerine Passat, is loaded to the stops with all our worldly belongings; the boot is held down by shotcord over piles of boxes, the handlebar of one of our bicycles is creeping down the windscreen.

Across the toneless, almost invisible countryside, the narrow road is flanked by low cement walls, deep flood-emergency dikes, dusty poplars, cypresses, vines. We pass an occasional peasant figure, broad-butted on his puttering motorino , helmetless, cigarette in the corner of his mouth. Or it might be a woman, shopping-bag between fat knees, kerchief tight on grey hair, monumental somehow despite precarious movement, the face so grimly set. Other vehicles our cautious guide chooses to overtake are a tractor with an ageing dog balancing on the mudguard and a three-wheeled furgoncino , a sort of motorised wheelbarrow with tiny cabin, handlebar drive and a pile of scrap metal rattling perilously behind. Meanwhile, we ourselves are overtaken by bikes so white and fast my wing mirror doesn’t appear to register them, space-suited riders flashing into the distance, and then, of course, the usual chase of black or metallic Mercedes, Alfas, Lancias, BMWs. It was a traffic mix, a social mix, with which we were to become familiar.

Perhaps ten minutes out of town, without any noticeable change of speed, we find we are in a built-up area again; first a loose alignment of stuccoed houses, then the broad open space of Montecchio’s main, Montecchio’s only real piazza: small shops, tall cedars in two patches of scrubby green, a petrol pump with a weigh-in for trucks, a war memorial. All at once, the buildings close in, the road narrows drastically, the pavement on each side rises to a metre above ground level. Stout legs and slim are barely a foot from the passenger window. And still the traffic doesn’t change speed. We emerge, cross a bridge, wind left past the glaring heterogeneity of a huge new red-brick church, then more bridges, ditches and streams, until, just before the road climbs out of the village and into the hills, our would-be padrona indicates left and we are in Via Colombare.