Tim Parks - An Italian Education

Suddenly a huge group of children are all rushing down to the water’s edge. It’s a colonia , a summer camp, and the children are being supervised by a not unattractive woman, in her early thirties, perhaps. The eight-to-ten-year-olds plunge into the shallow water, shoving and splashing each other and generally looking for fun and trouble. But ‘ Alt! ’ screams the female voice. ‘Not beyond il limite delle acque sicure. Per l’amore di Dio! ’ The poor children have to resign themselves to playing and fighting in water, which, at the line the blue rope traces, is barely more than two feet deep.

For the one thing I haven’t told you about the geometry of the beach at Pescara is that some three hundred yards out to sea there is a series of huge breakwaters. Made up of great blocks of stone, they form humpy little islands of granite and weed and crabs. Each breakwater is diagonal to the land, though together they form a barrier parallel to the shore and arranged in such a way that the Adriatic’s slow tide can bring sand in toward the beach, but can’t take it out. The beach is thus getting bigger with every passing season, and the water shallower. When they put up that rusty warning, LIMITE DELLE ACQUE SICURE, God knows how long ago, it probably really meant something. Now you couldn’t even drown a cat there. Hence, as so often in Italy, one finds oneself engaged with a system of rules or warnings that are now quite anachronistic. And the only positive thing one can say about this is that in general they’re not enforced. Only the poor children of the colonia are forced to stay inside il limite delle acque sicure . Because here there are questions of supervision and insurance and responsibility. Everybody else simply ignores the leaning pole with its silly warning. Or children like to scrape up wet sand and throw it at the big red letters. And sometimes, rushing in or out of the water, or engaged in a splash fight, somebody will bang into it and hurt themselves. The pole is more dangerous than what it warns of.

The aeroplane with its advertisement flies back along the beach, and now the long strip of orange plastic reads . I have always wondered about the cost effectiveness of this kind of advertising.

The day passes. The sun is at the zenith. Sitting in the shallow water one casts no more than a sliver of a shadow. And it’s too hot. Eventually I decide to do what Italian mothers do. I pick Michele up and wade out to sea. The mothers do this because a little further out across the water the iodine is even stronger, even more therapeutic. I just want to cool down.

Beyond the colonia and children fighting, when the bottom finally dips to four feet or so, there are very few people around, just a group of adolescents playing a watery game of volleyball, and then a man dredging for shells. He has a stout stick with a very large net at the end around a rigid semicircular frame. The flat part of the semicircle he pushes down into the sandy bottom to get at shells below the surface. He lifts the net. Michele is leaning out of my arms to see.

‘Got anything?’

His old fat fingers sort rapidly through bits and pieces of weed and shell. His bald head is glowing with sunshine. By his side swings a battered old oilskin shoulderbag into which he occasionally slips something. He looks up. ‘ Che bellu citolo ,’ he says, looking at Michele. ‘ Citolo ’ means nothing at all to me, but he has that indulgent look older Italians inevitably reserve for the very young. It must be a local dialect. Reaching into another pocket he pulls out a tiny white whorl of a seashell and gives it to Michele. The baby’s hand closes round it in that determined way babies have. ‘ ’Azie ,’ he says. For ‘ grazie ’.

The old man wades on. Some mornings I have seen him and others like him spend three or even four hours dredging the water, often right in amongst the children and the bathers. They take cockles and mussels home to make sauce for their pasta and their sons’ and daughters’ and grandsons’ and granddaughters’ pasta. Or the more enterprising will sell their harvest to the shops.

Then a voice is calling me. It’s my father-in-law standing at the seashore. Rita has deserted the beach and gone shopping. ‘ Nonno! ’ Michele cries. Grandfather! Apparently he has been instructed to take over so that I can have a swim.

Carrying the boy back through the sunshades, I hear the cry of ‘ Cocco ’ again. ‘ Cocco fresco! ’ It makes you think how many people are weaving back and forth along this narrow stretch between land and sea: The coconut pedlar and a variety of immigrant trinket sellers, the old shellfishers, the aeroplane, the fatties looking for exercise, the asthmatics for air, back and forth, back and forth in beloved routine. For they will do exactly the same tomorrow. And the next day. And the next. ‘ Cocco! ’ (The boy bangs his bucket, but my father-in-law isn’t interested, already thinking of his aperitivo only half an hour away.) ‘ COCCO! ’ And the aeroplane begins to drone again, joining a weft of sound and gesture over a warp of sharp colour.

Hurrying out to sea for my swim, it’s suddenly very clear, the nature of this world my son is growing into: a world so regularly layered in its ranks of sunshades, its people, who are mothers with their children, or fathers out at work, or old men fishing, or lifeguards half-heartedly fighting off sirens, all without exception doing exactly what is expected of them. There’s the neatly paved path, the stretch of hard sand (rushing head down between flying rackets this time), the fifty yards or so of milling children, the still water, and then beyond that the bastions of the whole thing, the outer wall of this geometric civilisation, those great stone breakwaters at their regular angles and intervals. I launch into a swim and clear them after ten minutes or so. A couple of men are sitting on top fishing, and a pedal-boat full of teenagers tips dangerously as the kids try to get onto the rocks without getting wet. On another rock, a boy is trying to do something with a girl…

But beyond the breakwaters, nothing. Never a swimmer out in the real sea with its long, slow swell. I swim a couple of hundred yards beyond the rocks. There are the marker buoys of a few crabbing pots, and on the horizon a ship of some kind. Further that way is, was, Yugoslavia with all that we know is happening there. Lying on my back, I can complacently reflect that Italy, for all its faults, must be one of the most civilised places in the world for a child to grow up. I shall write a book about it, I tell myself. Since that appears to be what people expect of me…

You think you will write a book, but then you think again. You delay. Years sometimes. The truth is I have always been suspicious of travel writing, of attempts to establish that elusive element which might or might not be national character, to say in sweeping and general terms, this place is like this, that place is like that. One always thinks: but I’ve met French people who weren’t at all droll. Or: but I’ve been there and didn’t find it at all romantic/ squalid/ interesting. Or worse still: how long has this author been there anyway? Two months, three? How can he possibly know anything deep about the place? How can he tell us anything more about it than the casual phenomena any traveller would notice, conversations in bars and things only half understood on the street. At which point it all becomes no more than an exercise in eloquent reportage, or like those novels by Dumas that speak so entertainingly of countries the author never visited.