Tim Parks - An Italian Education

At midnight, everybody in bed at last, the lawn sprinkler system comes to life with an enormous explosive splutter and hiss, then settles into the soft shushing and ticking of modern plumbing. Stefi uses it as an excuse to get into our bed. Waking at two in the morning, I look at the thermometer in the sitting room and find it is thirty-two degrees — in the house! There’s a little giggle. Turning round, I find both Michele and Stefi naked on the tiles. They can’t sleep. It’s too hot, it’s suffocating. But I’ve had enough of this misery. ‘Time for Mamma to take you to the sea,’ I announce.

So southwards in the car. To Pescara, to i nonni , to the beach. First across the flat blazing haze of the Bassa Padana, then the busy stretch of road between Bologna and Rimini with its ribbon development of paint and ceramics factories in stylish modern prefabs. Until finally you’re running along the Adriatic coast, and here there are tunnels and steep slopes with dramatic hilltop villages, and campanili and castles. Down the central reservation of the autostrada , a ribbon of oleanders trembles white, pink and cream in the breeze of racing cars, an astonishing gift of colour, while the fields above the road are small hillside puzzle pieces of dusty corn or towering sunflowers. How intense their yellow is, how it focuses the day’s diffuse light! Rita explains to the children that sunflowers all turn like so many soldiers on parade to follow the sunshine riding high. ‘Unless it’s the sunshine following them,’ Stefi says. The little girl is developing a flair for the poetic, or absurd. Technical Michele immediately points out that when the sunflowers aren’t there the sun goes round just the same, so it can’t be the sun following them. There follows a long discussion on astronomy: the sun fixed, the earth moving, the sunflowers torn between the two. Stefi gapes and says she’s dying of thirst.

We’re approaching Senigallia when the radio sees fit to warn us that it would be wiser not to set out on a journey in this heat. I have turned to the motorway information station, which mainly plays Muzak, reminds you to stop regularly for coffee, and unfailingly alerts you to traffic jams when you’re already in them. Yes, a knowing voice says, this heat is definitely controindicato . It is so easy to get fractious, or even fall asleep. Don’t set out unless you absolutely have to. ‘But we did absolutely have to,’ Michele protests. So did everybody else. The road is packed.

‘Are we travelling down the boot, Mamma?’ Stefi asks. ‘Have we got to the heel yet?’ Michele is contemptuous. ‘We’re not going any further than mid-calf and we’re not halfway there yet.’

Further south, on a hillside above the dark mouth of a tunnel, wheat has been planted in a large heart shape to decorate the steep slope of alfalfa. The children get so excited by this: a huge tawny yellow heart on the glistening green hill! And there’s another! And another! The farmers must be paid by the tourist board, Rita remarks. No! Stefi immediately waxes sentimental. A heart means love, she insists. The farmers put the hearts there to say they love nature. It sounds exactly like a line from one of her school plays. Passing into a long, deep tunnel below one of those hearts, we are suddenly met by flashing hazard lights. There’s a desperate screeching of brakes, the traffic grinds to a halt. Here we stay put for more than an hour.

There’s been an accident up ahead. People walk up and down the tunnel. Mainly they’re families going on holiday or men going to spend the weekend with families already on holiday. They fraternise. They complain. The mothers can’t decide whether it’s better to be stopped inside the tunnel, where at least we have the cool, or outside, where fumes can’t get trapped like this. Exploring the narrow service passage between our own tunnel and the northbound one, the children are fascinated and frightened. Popping our heads out the other end, we see the traffic thundering by as though through the night…

Back in the car, Michele remarks angrily. ‘This would never happen up north.’ ‘Never,’ Stefi complains. Apparently their conditioning is now so complete there’s nothing Rita or I can do to stop it. But it’s interesting that when we do finally arrive in Pescara neither of the children appears to notice the things that do distinguish the streets here from those up north: the larger, more garish, more American billboards and neon; pavements absent or broken; white stop lines only a memory…

But the children can be forgiven their substitution of preju dice for observation. For what they are seeing, as any child should, is that we are now running along the seafront with its scores of bathing stations, its thousands upon thousands of sunshades, its white sand, its mill of happy people. We have arrived; we are on holiday. And though the sunshine is just as hot in Pescara as it was up north, the air here is fresh and vibrant. Everywhere you have the impression of zest and clarity, so that, looking left, all the brilliant colours of beach life seem to have been scissored out of sharp light and neatly pasted on the kitsch blue sea behind. You can breathe here in Pescara, you can enjoy yourself. The children don’t think of any of this, but they immediately perk up and even begin to show some affection for each other. Michele will help Stefi to learn how to swim, he says. She will feed in the tokens, she promises, when he is playing his seaside computer games. For my own part, I imagine how the locals here would suffer any amount of disorganization and insult rather than move to our suffocating world of straight lines and sultry heat up north.

It might be the following morning, walking down to the sea, that Stefi sings the famous little sixties song:

Per quest’anno non cambiare ,

Stessa spiaggia, stesso mare .

I’d love to give the translation of this the same trite rhyme and rhythm the Italian has, since triteness, or a sort of sentimental affection for all the cosy simplicity that triteness entails, is exactly what these lines are about. But it can’t be done. I’ll just offer the bare bones of the thing, leaving you to look at the Italian again — stessa spiaggia, stesso mare — and imagine it being sung to a plonky tune by a rosy six-year-old already in her bathing costume and swinging bucket and spade in her hand, the bucket full of all kinds of little plastic moulds for making rabbits and dogs and ducks and cats of sand.

This year, don’t change,

Same beach, same sea.

She repeats it over and over, having forgotten, as almost everybody has, the rest of the song.

This year, don’t change,

Same beach, same sea.

Her little girl’s eyes are bright jewels of pleasure as she hums Pooh-bear-like and holds hands along a street where grass grows through a seasick pavement, where a mechanic has brought his work obtrusively out of his garage — so that we have to walk round overalled legs beside a dusty Alfetta — where a railway line dismantled fifteen years ago still crosses the tarmac, still hasn’t been turned, in either overgrown direction, to any more use than the feckless know to find for it late at night. Ring pulls, butt ends, syringes and used condoms abound in the grubby shale. I hurry the children past, though bougainvillea is brilliant on the broken masonry of something abandoned and there are geraniums growing wild between sleepers. Incongruously, an Arctic husky dog barks as we pass. Already suffering from the heat at eight-thirty in the morning, the fashionable animal is chained in the shade of a hanging ball of colour, a flesh-pink oleander trained up into a tree. The stench of cats at a corner is nauseating…