Tim Parks - An Italian Education

Then the bathing stations end and the pineta begins. A pineta is a thick stand of tall maritime pine on the sandy soil where beach meets land, the kind of pines with dramatically windblown trunks and an umbrella of dusty needles. I explain to the children that this pine wood used to stretch down the whole coast, for hundreds of miles, and that when Mummy was a little girl, she and Nonna and her brothers used to take shade under the pineta , not under a sunshade.

We get off our bikes and wander on a carpet of cones and needles. The trees are tall, the air very still and richly scented. A buzz of insects only insists on the stillness, the heat of the afternoon. There’s even a snatch of birdsong. But almost immediately the kids begin to come across the kind of things you don’t want them to — including the now ubiquitous syringe — and you have to haul them back to their bikes.

The pineta , its role in summer holidays, in love affairs and murder mysteries, plays such an enchanting part in the Italian fiction I love best: Morante, Moravia, Cassola, Pavese. It must have been a mysterious spell-casting place in the days when it stretched endlessly up the sun-baked coast: quiet, warm, intimate and alien. But it’s almost all gone now. It will mean nothing to my children. Five hundred metres of pineta , then the bathing stations start again and you’re in Montesilvano, a cheaper satellite version of Pescara — European flags round cement monuments and the like. There are high-rise hotels along the front here, geared to cheap package deals. The children marvel at a man and woman suffering badly from sunburn. ‘Papà, Papà, those people know how to speak English!’ As if this were our own special preserve, a private family language. ‘They’re red as peperoni ,’ Stefi says, repeating a favourite expression of Rita’s. It sets her off singing another of the little songs children always know:

Ma quando tu prendi, tu prendi il solleone

Sei rossa, spellata, sei come un peperone

But when you lie under the hot, hot sun

You’re red, you’re peeling, you’re like a pepper.

It seems a shame that these bleach-white Brits, he with a soft, young man’s beer belly and she still blinking at the brightness of it all, should be herded fifteen hundred miles from Luton or Gatwick to miss the nice part of the place by only a kilometre or two, and then get fiercely burnt into the bargain…

But normally we avoid Montesilvano. We go south into central Pescara and beyond to the port. Riding the bike is trickier here. There is, as I say, a broad paved promenade, with people walking along it, mainly for leisure, and then people crossing it in a hurry to get to and from the beach. But there are also hordes of bikes going in both directions, and this without observing any rules of right or left, because this is not a proper road, of course, and then mopeds and scooters and motorbikes looking for somewhere to park, or simply, illegally, cruising… An aerial video showing how everybody manages to thread through all this without ever giving way to anybody else, but without ever colliding either, might reveal much about the Italian character.

To the right of the paving, as we cycle south, there’s the strip of grass, now cut, the palm trees and all the parked scooters. Michele and I once gave up counting them at a hundred and seventy-something after only a few moments’ riding. To our left are the bathing stations, quite endless — Las Vegas, Nettuno, Le Onde, Le Sabbie Dorate — and between them all the recreations each concession sets up at the top of the beach. The light is so intense that four boys playing table-tennis are flattened to silhouette. And there are tennis courts, and six-a-side football pitches and volleyball nets… All in all, with the promenade and the games beside, it makes for constant movement everywhere, and an overwhelming presence of flesh. For nobody is dressed, least of all the cyclists, least of all ourselves. I don’t know why, but there is something particularly foreign to me about near nakedness on bikes and motor-bikes, that combination of skin and the machine, brilliant bathing costumes on leather pillions and soft calves against pressed metal. But perhaps by foreign I just mean something I never saw in my own childhood.

We press on, the children inevitably playing those games that involve having to ride over every drain or manhole cover, whether to right or left of the track. It’s amazing how patient the other thousands of cyclists are, how ready to thread and weave. It’s so unlike the behaviour of the cars on the road. After a while I stop yelling at them and settle down to enjoy the rich parade of it all. For the bathing stations grow nobler and grander towards the centre with great potted palm trees and flower displays outside, white tablecloths and polished wine glasses in the shady spaces within. You begin to see uniformed waiters standing smart and straight at the doors, or tending to the provincially elegant about their cocktails. There are even the twisted pillars, red lanterns and general bizarrerie of the Shanghai Chinese restaurant, inevitably emitting some cracked oriental tune. Neither the schlock façade nor the music seems out of place here in Pescara.

Next to the Shanghai is a place that seems to have been built entirely of blue tiles. It is the carabinieri ’s very own bathing station, where the hard-working boys in uniform can come to relax off duty. Would the English police ever be granted their very own spot on the beach? And in prime space, too! I fear not. The carabinieri strut up and down the promenade in their splendid black trousers with the red stripes down the side, that Stefi says are only there to help them find their pockets. They usually go in pairs, as do the young girls here, and sometimes a pair of young girls arm in arm will salute a pair of young carabinieri side by side. There’s a sunny complacency as they all shake hands, a mood of self-congratulation. Michele and Stefi weave in and out, concentrating on the trajectories between manholes, shouting about all the enemy bases they are destroying, taking entirely for granted this balmy abundance of sun and colour and beauty.

‘How many computer games do you think there are along this front?’ I ask Michele, playing to his love of number and measure. ‘In all these bathing stations here. Come on, guess. And guess how many ice-creams there are in how many freezers.’

His eyes roll, almost causing him to have an accident. A smaller child was dragging a huge, inflated dolphin. But they’re already Italian enough to avoid each other, albeit at the cost of Michele having to put a foot down.

So, I’m just getting used to this luxury of shade and light, of canvas and painted wood and cement and vegetation — laurels, geraniums, oleanders — colour everywhere, this wealth of tables and lazy revelling, when all of a sudden… nothing…

Right in the middle of the town, there’s an empty space. Right where you feel there should be another Fellini set teeming with life… nothing but parapet, beach, sea. The impression we get, as we cycle past this hole, this vacuum, this anomaly, is that of a piece of desert some army has just retired from. TV images of Kuwait. There is litter everywhere — cans, foil, paper — and a thin sprinkling of bodies between, inert on the dirty sand, sprawled, as if slaughtered and stripped in enemy territory. A couple of dogs sniff about, a single white sunshade suggests surrender.

Why, the children want to know. Papà! Why is this ugly place allowed to exist right in the middle of town?

It’s the public beach, I explain, an area where anybody can go and lie down and perhaps even set up their own sunshade without having to rent one. It’s there by law, so that no one can say the beach is entirely privatised and denied to the very poor, or to those few so idiosyncratic as not to wish to be part of the group in the homely environment of their own deck chairs…