The Pillars of Hercules

Next to the railway line the calm and relatively shallow Adriatic gleamed, almost motionless, even at the shoreline, all the way through Abruzzi. And always the little ritual of the stationmasters at the smaller stations, the man in his crimson peaked cap, brandishing his wand, blowing his whistle, finally saluting as the train clanked away, all the couplings ringing like hammered anvils. I saw fat sheep and grapevines and olive trees. There were backyards, too, some of them with miserable-looking people in them. I remembered how, for years in London, riding the train home, I felt a sense of personal failure riding past the backyards of Clapham and Wandsworth. There was a point to be made about the way the trains in the Mediterranean traversed the rear of so many houses, and their melancholy backyards. It was so revealing, if you could stand it.

Leaning against the window, in the corridor of the train, looking at the road that ran beside the tracks, I heard two young men beside me talking. They were noticing the more expensive cars. A large red motorcycle, a man and his woman passenger, swung out from behind a car and passed it, the shapely woman hugging and holding on.

“What a bike,” the first boy said. Che moto.

“What an ass,” the second boy said. Che culo.

I got off at San Benedetto del Tronto, where at the Center for Aqua-culture and Mariculture at the University of Camerino I looked for someone to talk to about the condition of the Mediterranean. San Benedetto advertised itself as a holiday destination—the coast was crammed with hotels and beaches—but I was interested in water quality and fish farms.

“Yes, we have fish farms,” said Dr. Gennari Laurent, who was half French and half Italian. He said he was glad to see me. There was not a lot of public interest in fish farms. “We are growing sea bass and bream.”

He was talking about small numbers—three hundred thousand fry compared to 200 million grown in the rest of Europe. But it took three years for a fish to grow to maturity in northern waters, two years in the south.

“We are mainly a research establishment. Still, we eat them.”

“Do you put them into the Mediterranean?”

“It is very difficult to introduce fish into the sea,” Dr. Laurent said. “Take a fry that has been fed on dry pellets. You can’t fatten him and put him into the sea, especially a sea bass. They have a particular way of feeding. A bream might possible adapt. But that’s not our purpose. We are studying a whole new area of fish farming.”

“For commercial purposes?”

“Eventually,” he said. “Greece has hundreds of fish farms—bass and bream. France raises trout. The British grow salmon. Italy is way ahead in eels—for eating, of course.”

The decline in the eel population was a good indication of how bad pollution had become, he said. The European glass eel was once found all over the Adriatic, and was caught in great numbers around Venice; but now the eel did not travel more northerly than Ancona, because of the vile water.

“The Yugoslavia side of the Adriatic is deeper, so there are more fish,” he said. “One of the problems on the Italian coast is river pollution. The Po is very bad. I studied it myself. I found very bad water quality in the delta areas. Metals. Nitrates. Copper, for example. In fish it is immunodepressive—it breaks down the fish’s immune system, so they get diseases.”

“I was under the impression that fish farms created pollution from all their accumulated excrement.”

“Yes, that happens. The laws are lax here but strict in, say, Holland. But it is possible to reduce the level of ammonia through certain diets, or by using filtration.”

“Do you think that someday there will be no fishermen in the Mediterranean, just fish farms?” I asked.

“There will always be some fishermen here,” he said. “During two months in spring there is a ban on trawling, but after that everyone fishes twice as hard. It’s hopeless!”

By the time I left the university and reclaimed my bag at the station it was dark and so I spent the night in San Benedetto, a tourist town with no tourists yet. I caught an early train to the good-sized city of Ancona. This was also a large harbor and ferry port, with ships to Greece and Croatia. The district at the end of the railway line in Ancona was called Pinocchio. “As for Ancona,” James Joyce wrote at the turn of the century, “I cannot think about it without repugnance. There is something Irish in its bleak gaunt beggarly ugliness.” Some of that bleakness is apparent today, but it is softened by the friendly and apparently prosperous people of Ancona, whose luck it is to live on one of the great harbors of the Adriatic.

As soon as I found a hotel I went for a walk to the harbor. A fisherman at the port, Signor Impiccini, said that his catches were miserable. I told him I liked the fish they called triglia.

“They are best when they are small,” he said. “Over eight or nine inches they don’t taste nice.”

“Are they found outside the Adriatic?”