Tim Parks - An Italian Education

The children want to walk along the parapet a couple of metres above the beach. In this way we proceed past the Delfino verde (the Green Dolphin), then the Orsa maggiore (the Great Bear) until we come to the Medusa. These are the bathing concessions, and the children know all their names on and on along the front towards the centre — Calipso, Sette pini, La Sirena, Belvedere, Miramare, Aurora — all their names and all their various advantages and disadvantages: the bar at the Delfino verde doesn’t have fresh brioches, but the hot showers are truly hot and even have a windscreen of bamboo, an unusual feature in a country where most people will desert the beach if the breeze does anything more than stir the tassels on the sunshades. The Orsa maggiore has hot showers too, and you don’t even have to pay here. But there is no windscreen, and the attendant hangs around to see that you don’t push the time switch down more than twice. You get two spurts of no more than forty seconds each. The Medusa has freezing cold showers lined up in a row on a block of cement. They deliver unbelievably icy water in great swishing jets that still the heart as you step under them from burning sand. But the Medusa also has the best terrace bar, with the best pizzette , and the best computer games.

‘And the colour of the sunshades, kids? Do you remember the colour of the sunshades on the different concessions?’

It’s the first day. We’re passing the Orsa maggiore and I’m holding Stefi’s hand as she walks the parapet. Michele likes to lead the way, as little boys will. ‘Close your eyes, now, don’t cheat. See if you can remember them from last year. Oh, but you’ll have to stop walking a moment if you close your eyes!’

Although the children are reasonably bilingual, there are some categories of things they will always return to Italian for: the days of the week, the months, numbers, colours, all things that have some kind of order, funnily enough, some rigid formality.

So Michele now begins: ‘Delfino verde, verde e arancione .’ Green and orange.

And Stefi: ‘Orsa maggiore, rosso e giallo .’ Red and yellow. But they argue about this because Michele thinks it is rosso e bianco . They stand there above me, eyes screwed shut arguing about the colours of the sunshades. On the parapet below them I notice an obscene graffiti. It says: I peli della figa istupidiscono la gente . Literally: ‘Cunt hair drives people crazy.’ Fair comment. But for the moment I say: ‘Okay, we’ll check the Orsa maggiore in a minute. What about the Medusa?’ Immediately, the children sing: ‘ Bianco e blu ’, and they’re right, of course, because it is to the Medusa we go every year. The Medusa is the best. It is our bathing concession. Same beach, same sea. Never, never change.

I’m thinking now that perhaps the best way I can tell you about Pescara, about Italian holidays in general, is just to take you through a day, one day. Because a day in Pescara is many days, and everybody’s day. And not just in Pescara either, but in Rimini, Cesenatico and Jesolo, too, and in Senigallia and Riccione and San Benedetto and every last seaside resort along the Adriatic. A day in Pescara is triumphantly representative; it reproduces itself, like the palm trees and sunshades, endlessly in time and space. For this is not a holiday such as those I remember from my own childhood where the first thing Mother and Father did was to buy an ordnance survey map and track down the places mentioned in the brochures you’d find left on a shelf by the door in boarding house or rented caravan. Then each day we would have to decide what we were doing, which walks to take, which villages to explore, museums to see, rocks to scale, all the time scrutinising the sky and saying, ‘It’s nice now, but how will it be in half an hour?’ or more often, ‘It’s miserable now, but with this wind there’s no reason why it shouldn’t be beautiful later on,’ so that in the end you set out anyway, rain or shine, often visiting a museum when the sun was powering down, or the beach when gales blew your towels away — wonderful holidays of discovery in windswept Welsh bays or nosing about those noble homes the aristocracy was just opening to the likes of us so that they could continue to enjoy their heritage at our expense; holidays of adventure and risk, of foaming surf, hard shale, precipitous paths; holidays where you might get caught in a thunderstorm far from home with father cleaning his glasses vigorously on his shirt tails and saying, ‘But on the map this definitely goes on through that thicket and back to the cottage’ — he prided himself on his map reading — whereas in reality the track petered out in dense bramble where an Austin A40 had been abandoned, and you would have to backtrack a mile and more under heavy rain in waterproofs that never were, and when you finally got back, exhausted from exposure, Mother heated soup from tins, fussing with the Calor Gas, and invariably she would say, ‘Well, that was a good trek,’ or, ‘Well that was a walk and a half, wasn’t it? Now, what shall we do tomorrow?’ Those were holidays that made a hero of you, that made you proud of our glorious centuries of miserable weather, holidays that made you… English.

Pescara is not that kind of holiday.

In Pescara you don’t consult maps. You don’t wonder what you will do. You don’t scrutinise the sky, which you know will be blue and blistering. You don’t discover anything. Or not the things my parents would have considered discoveries. For although steep hills rise directly behind the town to peak in a red-and-white communications beacon that my father, like so many Englishmen, would immediately have wanted to climb to, nobody does that here. The temperature is in the high thirties, the hillside has been defaced by ugly and probably illegal second homes made from great slabs of cement and defended by barbed wire and railings and thick cypress hedges. Nobody takes walks around the town. And very few people venture up the tortuous roads to the ancient villages of the hinterland, where parking is difficult and shade at a premium. Charming these places may very well be when you get there, but who has the energy to look for them in this heat? No, when in Pescara, you stay in Pescara. Or more precisely you stay the other side of that hectic road that marks off the town from the seafront. In short, you stay on the beach, where the discoveries you may make, as that all too eloquent graffiti daubed on the seafront parapet suggests, are ultimately those that my parents would have done anything to prevent us even imagining…

‘Adventure’ — in English — a hazardous enterprise, a risk, an exciting experience, with positive and above all respectable connotations of courage and bravado on the part of he or she who risks.

‘ Avventura ’ — in vernacular Italian — a brief affair.

But leaving aside, if we can, the steamier aspects, the fact is that in Pescara, on this Italian holiday, you are saved the awful business of trying to get a number of people to decide on what the day’s ‘projects’ will be. In Pescara you head off to the sea. Everybody heads off to the sea. The only decisions are: shall we take the masks and flippers as well as the buckets and spades and the air bed, and, who is going to carry what?

First day then, eight-thirty: we’ve remembered the names of the bathing stations, we’ve remembered the colours of their sunshades and now we pass through a vine-twisted arch into the Medusa, the name written deco-style in cleverly twisted metal. Here, unusually, I decide I need a cappuccino. The kids, I tell them, can walk through to where there are tall swings on the first part of the beach. They aren’t happy about this. They want me immediately. They want to be in the water now! But I need a break, I’m not into the rhythm of this yet. I deploy the classic ricatto . If Michele wants his tokens for the computer game after our swim, if Stefi wants me to build her a sandcastle, I deserve, don’t I, having dressed and breakfasted them, a few moments pausa to get my head together at the beginning of a long, hot holiday.