Tim Parks: An Italian Education

You don’t find many Italians on the public beach. Usually the people here are Germans or Scandinavians or British, unused to the idea of paying for beach space. Often there are foreign campers parked at the top. You see sleeping bags, even the circle of a small fire. Looking at all the litter, appreciating how rarely they must clean it, I suspect the place is deliberately made as unattractive as possible so as not to harm the business of the bathing stations, whose rent provides the local government with a steady income. But mostly the public beach shows you how the pleasures of Pescara are at least fifty percent manmade. Even under the splendidly azure sky, beach and sea alone are a wasteland.

A kilometre on from the public beach, beyond all the bathing stations, are the river and the port. The road turns right, away from the front, to skirt an oily harbour bristling with scores of fishing boats. We turn left onto the jetty. The children have to get off their bikes here because the paving was broken up for works some years ago and has never been repaired. There was enough money to pay for a striking new monument, though. Indeed, it’s been visible for most of our ride: a needle, perhaps fifty feet high, in a combination of travertine and cement conglomerate, scaly and graceless, clumsy in a way you couldn’t imagine a needle could be clumsy. On top stands a concrete Madonna, the stiff folds of her gown streamlined to rocket fins, as if she were about to be blasted off into the sky. The monument was erected in the anno mariano — Mary’s Year — in 1954, and perhaps the paving was broken to bring in the materials, then never repaired. On the needle at eye level, black metal lettering announces:

Maria

Fulgens maris stella

Piscoriae tuere filios

Mary

Bright star of the sea

Watch over your sons the fishermen

But do the fishermen understand Latin? Cycling up the long jetty, you see the boats going in and out — Madre Teresa, Padre Mariano, Santa Margherita — and you wonder how strong these appeals for divine protection can be now that the vessels are big and motorized, some with automatic systems for lowering and raising the nets. San Pietro Pescatore, Santa Lucia … As they pass, wallowing in the first sea swell, the colour of many of the crewmen suggests a different faith, suggests the immigrants’ search for that exhausting work modern Europeans are abandoning. There are black men winding ropes, Moroccans hauling nets. Santa Rita, Santa Monica … Fleetingly, it crosses my mind that Italians have as yet made none of those concessions to other cultures the British have: turbans on ticket collectors and chadors in the nursery. Life’s bric-a-brac here is still solidly Catholic. But the sense of inertia is growing. The immigrants are milling at the train stations, and the Italians are mislaying their rosaries amongst the clutter of their economic success. I can’t help feeling that this powerful modern boat thrusting out into the Adriatic with its crew of North Africans was most likely called Santa Monica not out of devotion, but just because no-one can yet imagine any other way to name a fishing boat.

We ride along the jetty. To our right is the channel of water the boats and ships ply. The children try to read the Slav name of some cargo ship: the Nikolai something or other, there’s too much rust to read the second part. A hydrofoil that still ferries back and forth from Croatia is tied with bright blue ropes. But to the left things are even more interesting. Along the left side of the jetty piles of huge concrete blocks have been dropped haphazard into the sea to form a breakwater. Perched out on these blocks, encroaching just a yard or two onto the jetty, are a line of what I can only think to call giant shacks. Thrown together with sheets of plywood and corrugated iron, railway sleepers, blue tarpaulin, red sheet-metal, chunks of driftwood, old fences, road signs, they are almost house-size, a good two storeys high, projecting motley and improvised on drunken stakes out over the rocks. Above them rise poles and masts crisscrossed by an impressive schooner rigging of hawsers and stays supporting long sprits stretching out over the water.

The first time you see these shacks, from a distance, they look like a line of old wrecks come to grief miraculously upright and almost orderly on some sandbank exactly perpendicular to the shore. You expect that at any moment one or all will founder forever. In fact, they are old concessions, licences granted way back and handed down from father to son giving the exclusive right to fish from a designated stretch of pier. Complex pulley systems raise and lower nets from the sprits out over the water. But what strikes you most — as with the farms on the hills above Verona where barns lean on cherry trees and vines twist themselves along wires stretched between shed and pergola — what really perplexes you here, is the tangle of man and nature, the shamelessly makeshift that somehow lasts forever, perhaps because it has bedded itself in so well, in the rocks, in people’s minds.

Sneaking glances through a door nailed together with a jumble of planks, the children spy a dank space crammed with fishing equipment — nets, boots, knives — and then a formica table with three big bottles of wine. Back in Via delle Primule, in the allotments behind the factory at the bottom of the street, the old men have similar set ups, improvised sheds crammed with gardening equipment, boots, knives, canes, and then what look like the very same wine bottles: a couple on a table and the rest in big crates against the wall…

‘Always such big bottles,’ Michele observes.

The jetty is about three hundred metres long, with these shacks all down one side. At the end is a small beacon, then another great pile of the concrete blocks tumbling out into the sea like giant sugar cubes. It’s a good place for fishing, and there are about ten people out there, mainly old men with immensely long rods armed with five or six spinners, legal here, presumably. Michele is determined to join them, but after our trips to I Laghetti I am not eager for any more fishing experiences. I try to explain that you need different tackle for the sea, surely he’d been aware of that when he wrote to Santa Lucia. This only makes him eager to possess all the equipment. Maybe sometime…

Michele ranges out over the treacherous rocks to get close to the action. The sea slaps in the cracks. The old men ruffle his hair. They’re happy to explain all their weights and baits, how and where to cast. After all, they’re here, like us, to kill the long, blue afternoon. They wear caps and swimming trunks and sandals, nothing else, and they let Michele hold their rods while they light fierce cigarettes and wave to me not to let the little girl on the rocks. ‘Not la bambina .’ Because Stefi’s crazy to get out there, too. She wants to join Michele. ‘Come on, Papà.’ The men wave their arms: ‘No, it’s too dangerous for a little girl,’ they shout. ‘It’s too dangerous,’ Michele calls complacently. Defiantly, I offer Stefi my hand and head out there.

‘If you catch a fish,’ the man giving his rod to Michele is saying, ‘Italy will win six nil tonight.’ Tonight there’s a game against Nigeria. The great World Cup adventure. Michele grips the rod harder than ever. He may not have enjoyed kicking the ball around in freezing twilight in Montecchio, but he certainly wants Italy to win. Intently, he winds in the line, giving little tugs as the men explain. But nothing. The men laugh. They don’t expect Italy to win six nil…

About twenty adolescents arrive and start kissing each other enthusiastically and climbing up and down the ladders on the beacon. The fishing boats roll in and out in a long swell. Apparently it’s one crew for the day and one for the night, with the changeover about now; five o’clock. The boats coming in have mainly white men on; the boats going out mainly black. And still no sign of a bite from any of the rods here on the rocks. Michele moves from one pensioner to another. Stefi and I are perched on a great cube of rock that slants rather viciously. To pass the time I encourage her new reading habit by getting her to decipher a spray-painted graffiti on the harbour wall opposite. It says: