(from A Season with Verona)

By age 10 their skills are evident. Their mothers are shrieking on the sidelines. Talent scouts are offering advice. By age 15 they are in a football college. They survive one selection after another. They see other boys leave, hanging their heads. Sensing they are destined for glory, they go to bed early, dreaming of the turf at San Siro, at the Olimpico. On the telephone Mamma and Papà urge them on. Their few old friends urge them on. They don’t drink and they don’t smoke. Their diet is controlled. The training is exhausting. By 17 or 18 they are playing in Serie C, or sitting on the bench in Serie B. Solemn men in heavy coats gamble on their future. They are bought and sold. A billion Lire this year, five billion next. They are shunted up and down the length of the bel paese, Treviso, Taranto, Palermo, Turin. They know no-one outside the world of football now. They hardly know what to say to a person who is not a player or a manager or a journalist. Or at least a fan. Is there anybody who is not a football fan? Continue reading →

My friend Simone and I have been concerned for some time about a mutual friend, Massimo, a man in his fifties. His affair with a plain young Neapolitan girl, barely twenty-three, has being going on for almost three years. Every week, twice or three times, he risks all kinds of trouble with wife and family to see the girl. Exasperated, Simone, a Milanista, tells me: “I said to him, Massi, I said, I have the video of Milan beating Benfica to win the Champions Cup. Fantastic game, historic moment. Orgasm for the rossoneri. I’ve seen it, what, a dozen times? But in the end, enough is enough! Understand? How many times can you watch Frankie Rijkaard slotting it in? People start to find you weird. Get on with something else!”
How many times? In Germany on business I check into my hotel around one in the morning, pull out a beer from the fridge and turn on the television. The only channels I can get are showing pornography or football. Girls or goals. And zapping back and forth between a long-haired caveman who just goes on and on pressing his enviable torso against beauties of various ethnicities, and then all the goals in the French, Spanish and even African leagues, I’m suddenly struck by how much football and eroticism have in common. There’s an inevitable sameness about each game, each sexual encounter, yet a seemingly inexhaustible yearning to repeat. Time after time. Now the Neanderthal is crushing a cheerful little Asian girl, but he still has the same glazed look in his piggy eyes. Now it’s Zidane shooting into the top left corner, but the ecstatic embraces are always the same, likewise the goalkeeper’s remonstrations with the linesman. Continue reading →

He cuts a figure.

The elegant black overcoat and broad brimmed hat are carried with a determinedly upright gait. At 75 his hair is long and wavy, the beard natty, the eyes bright. He is a remarkable writer. His books are translated into more or less all the languages people read literature in, except, alas, English. His name is Joseph Zoderer, and he is Italian.
Or maybe not.
In a novel called The Turtle Party a young man in a bus crossing Mexico is chatting up a Spanish woman. Eventually she asks him why he is speaking in Italian. It’s clearly not his native tongue. Zoderer’s young alter ego hesitates. “He didn’t want to explain; speaking one language and belonging to another country had constantly obliged him to choose between giving a history lesson or arousing suspicion.”
Sitting in front of a big log fire, I tell Zoderer: “You’ll have to give us that history lesson. Otherwise people won’t understand why we’re speaking Italian.” Continue reading →

You never know what may be coming through the e.mail. “James Atlas,” this says. “Proposal.” Is it junk mail?
I was working on A Season with Verona at the time, trying to get my mind round the way the Italians live football. The central paradox seemed to be an intense local loyalty, the ancient campanilismo, coupled with an anxious awareness that only money and foreigners can ever bring success. Dear Mr Parks, says James Atlas. Over many years, skip skip skip… your work with interest… yes yes… American publisher … well, good … now launching a series of books by writers about money.
Hmm, books by writers! There’s an idea.
But why about money rather than for money?
…suggest with your knowledge of Italy … (at least he’s not offering penis enlargement) … you are the right person to write a book about the Medici bank in the 15th century.
No! I stared at this e.mail. He couldn’t be serious. Imagine: Italian lives in England for twenty years and automatically becomes the right person to write about the cavaliers and the roundheads. I don’t think so. Continue reading →

Having moved house some four years ago, we receive very little mail through our old address. However, there is one correspondent I have been unable to inform of the change. Every few months an envelope is forwarded by the patient Italian postal service. It comes from London. My name is scrawled in an untidy print, perhaps left-handedly. Someone is eager not to be recognised. Inside there is no private message or indication of the sender’s name. Instead, ripped from some newspaper or other, in anger it seems, there will be a bad review of a book of mine or even, as happens from time to time (inexplicable honour!), a personal attack.

Curiously, this all began about eight or nine years ago, around the time I asked my publishers to stop sending me reviews. One of the advantages of living in a foreign country is that one can, to some extent, isolate oneself. I no longer wished to be elated by praise or tormented by ridicule, just to get on with whatever I was doing. No sooner had I breathed a sigh of complacent relief – Tim, you are above such things! – than along comes the first of these many anonymous envelopes with their unpleasant contents. I’m back to Earth again. Continue reading →

‘What was that you said, Dad?’
‘Oh nothing Lucy.’
I’m at the wheel of my car in heavy traffic.
‘You didn’t say the ‘F’ word, did you Dad?’
Lucia is four. As it turns out these are two of the first full sentences she’s ever spoken in English. I’m proud of her. And embarrassed.
‘Idiot went on red,’ I explain.
‘That was the ‘F’ word you said, wasn’t it Dad?’ Continue reading →

That thought occasionally crossed my mind in the many years I disparaged the practice. I had no idea. The cross-legged statuesqueness of it and the beatific Buddha-smile were enough own to put me off. Whatever it was, it stank of prayer. Having escaped my parents’ evangelical aberrations, their exorcisms and speaking in tongues, I was more than happy with a world emptied of all things esoteric. You got busy and used your head and studied and wrote stuff, rational stuff, hopefully witty, and with any luck they would publish you and you would make money, you could afford a house, a car and children and you would become someone. Life presented itself as a task to which I felt I was just about equal, assuming I gave it absolutely all I had. There was no time for sloppy, slithery, New Age nonsense. Continue reading →

The notorious fans of Hellas Verona arrive in Roma, Stazione Termini, on their way to a crucial game in Naples. It’s 2001 when, amazingly, you could still smoke on a train.

7.40 am. Exhausted and hung-over after a long night on hard seats we were finally allowed out of our two locked, segregated carriages onto the platform at Termini, only to find ourselves under attack from a huge crowd of Roma fans departing early for a game in Bari. Nervous, our police minders made a rapid change of plan. We had been supposed to get on an eight o’clock train that stops at Napoli Campi Flegrei not three hundred metres from the stadium. But suddenly, coincidenza! Now we had to get on the quarter past seven locale to Napoli Centrale. The advantage was that the train was waiting right there beside us. That would stop us clashing with the Roma fans. But the guard was already blowing his whistle. The doors were closing. And no segregated carriages had been provided. All of a sudden the notorious Brigate Gialloblù were being hurried onto a packed train where they were actually going to mix with normal people. It was a startling development.
By a miracle I found a seat at a window opposite a pretty young girl. She was smoking in an absorbed kind of way, an exercise-book on her lap. Beside me was one of the fan leaders, Spada, and opposite him one of the younger boys with long black hair bursting out of his brigate cap. Seeing the girl, my new friend Scopa stops in the corridor. He flourishes a cigarette. “Got a light, signorina?” Continue reading →

Sunday is Valentine’s Day. But we already know that Matteo Viviani is giving Isabella Tosi a ring. ‘It’s gold!’ my daughter Stefi insists. She is very excited. Matteo and Isabella are in her class. But he is eleven, a year older than her, because he got sent down a class for failing all his exams. ‘They’re in love,’ Stefi simpers.
‘Rubbish!’ my wife snaps. We are both troubled by this precocity. TV commercials have been showing pre-pubic sweethearts exchanging expensive gifts. While the old are expected to stay younger, the young, apparently, must have adult aberrations as soon as profitably possible.
‘Hurry up, Papà, I need the bathroom.’
My son Michele, who at thirteen only recently stopped turning away in disgust when lovers kissed in films, tells me he has to take a shower. It’s a welcome surprise. Usually his clothes have to be sequestered before he will even consider it. But he seems pensive. ‘What an idiot,’ Stefi is, he says, ‘Drooling over rings and things.’ Continue reading →

If Brahma is a more endearing creator than Jehovah it is because he wasn’t pleased with what he had made. The great god found the world dull and dusty. Death was the answer, suggested Shiva. Living forever, people were bored. A time-limit would galvanise, give dignity. But in that case some way of replacing the population would have to be found. Brahma brought together a few trusted fellows and explained what was required. The pleasure took them by surprise. What was that for? To put a fresh shine on the world, they were told. Otherwise it might get dusty again…

I’m always taken aback when people talk about the eroticism of food and drink, of sunbathing and massage. This is mere sensuality. Or avoiding the issue. No experience even remotely compares with true eros, with long and lavish love-making. It is perfectly understandable that people should imagine its having been tacked on to creation afterwards, so extravagant is the pleasure it brings, so far beyond what is necessary. Never does the world seem so freshly painted, so brightly enamelled, so new, for heaven’s sake, as after the best sex. But, alas, depending on where you’re up to in life, it may be full of new complications too. A lesser authority than Brahma’s would have issued a health-warning.
Continue reading →