Tim Parks - An Italian Education

This is the Pescara scene then, its pleasures and irritations, between the exotic and the squalid. Yet the important thing, as Italians, really the only important thing, is that we have come back to the same place: stessa spiaggia, stesso mare , same beach, same sea. We have come here every year now since the children were born. And we will continue to come. Already Stefi is celebrating this decidedly Latin pleasure.

In Pescara when you see cars with German plates, you can feel fairly sure they’re not driven by Germans. They are the cars of those who chose to give up home to find work. Like migratory birds they’re always back for their summer holidays. And further down the Italian boot, where life is wilder, in Calabria or Puglia, the newspapers will report on mafia bosses being arrested because they have come home to spend their holidays by the beach they like best, near their mothers… The Mediterranean epic, from Ulysses on, was ever one of return.

So, what normally happens, as I said, is that Papà takes wife and family down to the beach, to an apartment, a pensione, a relative, in Jesolo, in Rimini, in Cesenatico — broad safe Adriatic beaches, shallow seas, low prices — then escapes to spend his summer at home, at least until his office or factory closes down in August and he can go and join his loved ones. Naturally, there are countless stories of infidelity; naturally, there is lots of men’s talk in gyms and bars. Inevitably the media carries out useful surveys of the variety: does a prostitute’s business increase during June and July when men are freer, or fall off because, being freer, they are more able to see or seek a mistress? This year, though, there’s a more interesting scandal, the kind that never becomes a standing joke, because it involves… female infidelity. It turns out that a number of young mothers on their own with their children in Rimini have been lured into affairs with an engaging young man encountered on the beach. The man, impressively, has an apartment right on the front, where he invites them to make love to him. What they don’t know is that there is a concealed video camera in the bedroom, Soon they will be receiving blackmail threats. Finally, somebody goes to the police and the story comes out, but still all the mothers remark on how affectionate the man was, how gentle, what a good lover. Unfortunately, none of the papers seems interested in finding out what the women did with their children during these assignments, something surely uppermost in many an envious reader’s mind.

You flick through the summer pages. Magazines bristle with advice on holiday affairs. Nobody takes the moral line. Miraculously, the Pope knows to keep quiet for once. Apropos of some photographs of a nude newscaster with the wrong woman, a celebrity is quoted as saying he thinks that in summer everybody should have the opportunity to ‘put horns on their partner in peace and quiet’.

This, then, the routine holiday, this the tang the air has for the adults, at once domestic and salty, while the children, free at last from school, catechism, oppressive heat and mud wasps, measure their distance from Mother’s apron strings along the endless beach…

But what I’m going to tell you about now is a different summer; the summer seven years after the one that started this book. For this year, my wife, well advanced in a third pregnancy and thus beyond every contemporary Italian pale of measure and caution, was unable to come to the beach. So Papà became Mamma and took the children to the sea alone. It was the year of role reversal, the year, for me, of an initiation into an Italian world that takes up such a large space in a child’s memories. It was also the year I fell in love… no, not with the Lolitas on the beach (with whom one is always in love), but with Pescara, an apparently unprepossessing seaside town with all the qualities of triteness and banality suggested by that little song Stefi sings as we walk out in the morning, but a town all the same that I believe has more to tell us about Italy today than all the monuments of Florence, Rome and Venice put together.

Same beach, same sea… At the bottom of the sleepy, dirty road my in-laws have inhabited since longer than anyone wishes to remember, lies the beach. We walk down there every morning, buckets and spades in hand. But before the beach one has to cross the lungomare , the seafront road. Aerial photographs would no doubt be able to show that there are still traces of zebra crossings every hundred metres or so along this busy road, but local drivers are cheerfully unaware of this, and the authorities do not seem eager to remind them. We stand there, Michele, Stefi and I, on the kerb as the cars race by. Nobody stops. After a few minutes’ pointless patience, I make the corna gesture with both fists, grab the children one in each hand and walk right into the flow. Like the waters of the Red Sea, the cars respond to this gesture of mad faith. But only to this. Nothing less than complete recklessness will ever work that miracle of getting you across the seafront road at Pescara. The children are quick to take note. South of Bologna, it sometimes seems there is no rule but gesture and response. Fortunately, on the other side you do indeed arrive in the promised land…

First, there’s a thin line of slightly raised grass plots held in broken marble surrounds. Arrive in June and the grass is still uncut, perhaps two feet high, as if this were some ghost resort, untended for years. They get to it just before or just after the season officially begins in July. Spaced every ten yards or so in the coarse prickly grass stand the seafront palms. Some are old and majestic, some new and fresh, and some so young they seem no more than the fat tops of giant pineapples pushing out of the earth. But however old or young, these palm trees always seem to have the same size fronds, and it’s this that gives the seafront its solid geometry, its sense of repeating the same pattern on and on and on, every ten yards, tree after tree after tree as far as the eye can see. Their scaly barks make you think of snakes and reptiles, of drowsy survival in torrid heat. I always feel more ‘away from home’ when I see a line of palm trees.

Not so the children, who ignore them.

Between the palms and grass plots there are posts bearing rusty frames for holding posters. Again, one every ten yards. Without exception the posters advertise breasts and bottoms bursting from designer bathing costumes, or young lips kissing ice creams under a lover’s gaze. The images, like so much advertising in Italy, particularly summer advertising, have a slightly fifties, distinctly nostalgic feel to them — the dramatic make-up, the extravagant breasts — as if there were always some heyday to be remembered, some mythical past to be recalled and repeated ad infinitum.

Beyond the grass and the palms there’s a sort of avenue, a seafront promenade, where bicycles pass, and — illegally — mopeds and scooters. At the weekends cars invade the space and park there, again illegally, and sometimes the police or the carabinieri come and move them all away and fine everybody and are desperately rigid and unpleasant, and sometimes they don’t. The drivers risk it.

I get the kids down to the front by eight or eight-thirty. Already this is a bit lazy of me, since both my wife and Io e il mio bambino have insisted that the sun is best at seven-thirty. Best, of course, means healthiest, the vitamins without the ultraviolet, since the key to every official discussion about an Italian holiday is pretending that it is undertaken entirely for health purposes, whereas all the images you actually see, on those posters, on TV, and later on the beach itself, are screaming Fun, Pleasure, Sex…