UNO
I had been to Italy only once before. That had been a holiday to Rome in the summer of 1987, in one of those peculiar periods of Italian history when nothing was really happening. There was a sense of calm in the Kingdom - an advantage of decades of one-party rule and enough American financial aid to build a whole new country from scratch - and the Republic hadn't yet experienced the liberalising "Craxismo" that would later condemn it to history. I took a day trip to the border with the Republic and, as best as any English teenager could, tried to predict when Italy would reunify under a single flag. I was soon proved wrong in my predictions, in turn proving that I was not the smart-arse Nostradamus I thought I was. Four years later, the "Olive Curtain" fell and it appeared that I had been fairly optimistic about the survival of the RPI. Back then, we all were.
That was the last day of my holiday in Rome. I remember it because it was one of the few times I was sober: the money had run out and, in turn, the alcohol had run out too.
Despite the obvious excitement of visiting Italy, I never did return. Or, at least, I didn’t return until my trip earlier this year. I'd spent the past two decades and a half watching the events in Italy unfold through the television screen and the newspaper, never endeavouring to visit and see them for myself. It just never seemed like the right time. But, in the summer of last year, I was pushed by a friend in the Guardian editorial team to go and write up a few pieces about the new resorts popping up along the Dalmatian coast in Yugoslavia. I did those and, thankfully, they were well-received. But, something more came out of that experience. My island-hopping adventure allowed me to look at Italy from across the Adriatic and glimpse at what differences had come to pass in the peninsula since I'd stumbled around the streets of Rome at the age of eighteen. I was enticed; I was prepared to write anything.
After consulting with friends, who dissuaded me from putting my pen to Guardian paper again in the name of hotel comparisons, I resolved to write about the North. As far as I knew, the former People's Republic had been terra incognita for travel journalists all over the world. The deluge of work devoted to the North in the Nineties was, just like most writing dedicated to the old Warsaw Pact, marred by the usual Western snobbery and cynicism. Individual cities had been "rediscovered" after the Millennium, thus reassuring the serial travellers of Europe that they would be nominally safer in the industrial graveyards of the North than they would have been a decade earlier. Documentaries about the former Republic were not much better - Milan's State Murderers, a film that basically fictionalised the work of bureaucrats in the Ministry of State Security into a gruesome tale of intrigue, was released in 1998 to rave reviews... in southern Italy. Elsewhere, critics were eager to accuse the Italian media of "scraping the bottom of the barrel" and “sensationalising the past for propaganda purposes”.
I reflected upon all those portrayals that came before and I knew what I wanted to do. I wanted to write something serious, something that would explore the North properly. I wanted to speak to those who'd lived under Communist rule and those who'd been born in the post-unification world, so as to comprehend the unbridged gap between the North and the South. There were mysteries yet to be solved about the former RPI.
In March of this year, I packed up and headed to Rome by plane. Armed with a laptop, a notepad, a map, and the contact details of an experienced translator, I was determined to document everything I could in my travels.
The first thing of note was the airport.
Following an easy flight from Gatwick, I arrived at the Aeroporto George Marshall. Why was an Italian airport named after an American general of the Second World War? The answer, I later found, was simple: he gave Italy lots of money. Or, to be more precise, he leant his name to the European Recovery Program after the war's end. In the post-war years, in a fit of Americana, Prime Minister De Gasperi decided to rename the Ciampino Airport and shore up his position with President Truman. I had been here before, back in ’87, and I noticed that little had changed since that time. The shops were still overpriced and understaffed, the luggage handling was still inadequate, and there were still too many overweight men in Hawaiian shirts under the impression that any location south of Milwaukee, Wisconsin was an easy-going, tropical paradise.
But, what had changed was the most intriguing. There were no flights to North Italy throughout the Eighties due to “Comrade Cossutta” and his harsh travel restrictions, but they had been reversed shortly after his resignation in 1989. Since then, the tourists from Warsaw and Sofia had been replaced by a new breed of traveller from Naples, Paris and any number of cities around the world. I saw that flights to Florence, Milan and Venice were operating on a daily basis with most airlines, which encouraged me greatly. Plenty of people in the West are too young to understand how unimaginable that was for us, to see freedom of movement from one end of Italy to the other.
My taxi ride from the airport to the hotel was a mad dash across motorways and city streets, with a soundtrack provided by the cacophony of commentators’ voices on the radio and the profanity of the driver as he was cut up multiple times by, as he called them, “dumb bitch drivers”.
The South was a sane and civilised place, I had been told. After I had paid for the near-suicidal taxi and stepped off of the Via del Viminale to enter my hotel, I prayed that my translator was at least capable of telling a green traffic light from a red traffic light.