The Pillars of Hercules

In the Via Gambalunga, also on a “nice” street (dentists’ offices, villas, apartment houses), there was the “Club Riche Monde—Cabaret” and in small print No one under 21 Admitted and Porno Show. This also seemed Fellini-esque—degradation in a respectable neighborhood. As a younger man, ravenous for experience, I would have gone in. But it was after midnight, and I knew what was inside: expensive drinks and exhibitionism, and the kind of shakedown that makes you ashamed of how predictable the libido is. That, and the feeling of unease I got in the presence of public sex, like the irritation I felt when I saw comic books and porno mags all jumbled together on the newsstand. I went back to my hotel and read a book. Nowadays I did not want to put myself in the hands of pimps.

Another Fellini episode occurred the next day in Rimini. I was walking along one of the main streets and a bus lurched to a halt, and the passengers began banging on the windows. The driver had barricaded them in by locking the exit door, and a crowd gathered around the bus to watch the passengers arguing and struggling to get out. The police were summoned, and so were the ticket collectors from a nearby bus stop. There was fury inside the bus.

Ten African girls were gesticulating and howling in Italian. Then the doors opened and some old women got out. The African girls were still yelling at the driver. The police questioned them. “Where’s your ticket?” “Don’t touch me!” “We’re all together!”

An Italian dwarf in a silk suit, smoking reflectively, stood near me to watch.

“What’s up?”

“Tickets,” he said.

The crowd grew around the bus, and now the African girls were screaming. They were Somalis or Sudanese or Eritreans, from the old Italian colonies and mission stations. It was hard to tell where they came from because they were so thoroughly urbanized, each one in an expensive wig and tight pants and heavy makeup—purple lips, glittering mascara. It was a showdown, and it went on for about twenty minutes, but at the end the girls were triumphant, and they screamed abuse at the spectators and waved their bus tickets and swore at the driver. The police shrugged. The bus drove off.

Not all encounters between Africans and Italians are so jolly. The Violence Observatory, a Rome-based organization that monitors such incidents, reported that an average of at least one attack a day on foreigners was recorded in 1993, and the figures were higher in 1994. These were stabbings, shootings, beatings. All it took to provoke such an attack was a single episode—say a carload of Moroccans running down an Italian girl (as happened the same month at the Tyrrhenian resort of Torvavianca)—and local people began assaulting any darkish foreigner they encountered. A few months after I saw this odd encounter in Rimini a fire destroyed a barracks housing hundreds of farmworkers in Villa Literno near Naples. The victims were mostly Africans, who are now Italy’s tomato-pickers.

A satirist like Fellini, merciless and impartial, would have had something to say. And I began to think once again that the great justification for traveling the shore of the Mediterranean, if such a justification was necessary, was that the foreground—these sudden strange encounters—was much more interesting than the Roman amphitheaters and the ruins.

• • •

From Rimini I took a branch line train inland to Ferrara, via Cérvia and Lido di Savio, detouring around the enormous low-lying delta of the Po. The train stopped everywhere, picking up old people and noisy schoolchildren in this tucked-away part of Italy, all farming communities, crammed with fig trees and vineyards and fields tangled with artichokes.

I stopped in Ferrara and took a taxi to the nearby village—so it seemed from the map; it was called Dodici Morelli, it was just a crossroads, some houses, a thicket of hedges, a small church.

“There is not much here,” the taxi driver said.

“My grandfather was born here,” I said. “My mother’s father.”

“Bravo,” the man said. “He did the right thing—went to America!”

“He used to write poetry,” I said.

“Bravo.” He said it with feeling.

It was a short trip by train from Ferrara to the little station at Rovigo. On the way a Portuguese couple in my compartment quarreled with the conductor. The woman had injured her arm, she said. The conductor doubted her. He asked her to fill out a declaration. The woman did not speak Italian. I gathered that she was drunk.

“Why you write I push de doors? I no push de doors! Geeve me, you dunno!”

“In Venice you go to police.”

“Why? No! I no go! I escape from theese man!”