Italian Ways
On and Off the Rails from Milan to Palermo
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4.5 • 6 Ratings
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- £5.99
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
‘All Italy is here’ Sunday Times
From the bestselling author of Italian Neighbours, An Italian Education and A Season with Verona
Longlisted for the Dolman Travel Book Award
In 1981 Tim Parks moved from England to Italy and spent the next thirty years alongside hundreds of thousands of Italians on his adopted country’s vast, various and ever-changing networks of trains.
Through memorable encounters with ordinary Italians – conductors and ticket collectors, priests and prostitutes, scholars and lovers, gypsies and immigrants – Tim Parks captures what makes Italian life distinctive. He explores how trains helped build Italy and how the railways reflect Italians’ sense of themselves from Garibaldi to Mussolini to Berlusconi and beyond.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Italy's railways offer entr e into its charming, infuriating soul in this delightful travelogue-cum social commentary. Novelist and British expatriate Parks (Italian Neighbors) recounts his love-hate relationship with Italian train travel in rich, hilarious detail: the crazy ticketing and scheduling procedures; the Kafkaesque Trenitalia national rail bureaucracy; the oddly ceremonial cadences of train announcements; the grand station architecture festooned with glitzy lingerie ads; the epic battles with ticket inspectors over mysterious rules; the contrast between an aspiration to sleek, fast, convenient modernity and a reality of pokey, dilapidated, frustrating laggardness in "a nation at ease with the distance between the ideal and real." His fellow passengers yuppie blowhards, bored teens, bitter pensioners, gypsy beggars, pushy nuns, psychos, and prostitutes furnish him with an inexhaustible supply of piquant character sketches that bring to vivid life the warm conviviality of Italian culture. Combining wonderfully evocative prose with a wry analysis, Parks provides local color while continually seeking hidden social meaning; like a good anthropologist, he knows every wrinkle of the native culture yet is enough of an outsider to register its strangeness and particularity. The result is a fascinating portrait of a society that seems rooted in place no matter how fast it goes. Photos.
Customer Reviews
A really insightful read.
This excellent book by Tim Parks superficially describes Italy’s furiously complex rail system, but it quickly becomes a granular view of each railway carriage he travels on, each a microcosm of Italy’s people, politics, history and culture. It is meticulous without being tedious, fleshing out anachronisms or quirks with enough his context to bring you up to speed - his breakneck speed. His writing feels familiar, never condescending or stuffy, so I felt he was discovering a country as I was. The result is a cohesive portrait of Italy, made from flashes of the past, present and future that catch his eye as he thunders (or perhaps not) along Italy’s railways. A brilliant read.