Neither Here Nor There - Travels In Europe Part 5

'I see,' I said, trying to sound casual. 'I a.s.sume it has a private bath and colour TV?'

'Of course.'

'Free shower cap?'

'Yes, sir.'

'a.s.sortment of complimentary bath gels and unguents in a little wicker basket by the sink?'

'Certainly, sir.'

'Sewing kit? Trouser press?'

'Yes, sir.'

'Hair dryer?'

'Yes, sir.'

I played my trump card. 'Magic-wipe disposable shoe sponge?'

'Yes, sir.'

s.h.i.+t. I had been counting on his saying no to at least one of these so that I could issue a hollow guffaw and depart shaking my head, but he did not and I had no choice but to slink away or sign in. I signed in.

The room was pleasant and business-like, but small, with a twenty-watt reading light when will Europeans learn that this is just not good enough? a small TV, a clock radio, a good bath with a shower. I tipped all the lotions from the bathroom into my rucksack, then tossed in the little wicker basket, too well, why not? and went through the room harvesting matchbooks, stationery and all the other items that were either complimentary or portable. This done, I ventured out into Gothenburg, still famished.

The rain was falling in sheets. I had thought I might stroll out towards the famous Liseberg Gardens, but I got no more than a couple of hundred yards before I was turned back by the pitiless downpour. I trudged back to the city centre and tried to have a look around the main shopping district, sprinting squelchily from doorway to doorway and from one dripping awning to another, but it was hopeless. I wanted a restaurant, one simple, wholesome restaurant, but there seemed to be none. I was soaked and s.h.i.+vering, and was about to return in a desultory spirit to my hotel to take whatever food was offered there at whatever price, when I noticed an indoor shopping centre and darted in, shaking myself out like a dog. The shops were mostly dreary Woolworth's-type places and they were all shut, but there was a surprising number of people wandering around, as if this were some kind of marvellous place to take an evening stroll. There were a lot of young drunks staggering about too, most of them at that noisy and unattractive stage where they might want to be your pal or pick a fight or just throw up on you, so I gave them a wide berth.

One of the more striking features of Sweden and Norway is how much public drunkenness there is. I mean here you have two countries where you cannot buy a beer without taking out a bank loan, where successive governments have done everything in their power to make drinking not worth the cost and effort, and yet everywhere you go you see grossly intoxicated people in stations, on park benches, in shopping centres. I don't begin to understand it.

But then I don't begin to understand a lot of things about Sweden and Norway. It's as if they are determined to squeeze all the pleasure out of life. They have the highest income-tax rates, the highest VAT rates, the harshest drinking laws, the dreariest bars, the dullest restaurants, and television that's like two weeks in Nebraska. Everything costs a fortune. Even the purchase of a bar of chocolate leaves you staring in dismay at your change, and anything larger than that brings tears of pain to your eyes. It's bone-crackingly cold in the winter and it does nothing but rain the rest of the year. The most fun thing to do in these countries is walk around semi-darkened shopping centres after they have closed, looking in the windows of stores selling wheelbarrows and plastic garden furniture at prices no one can afford.

On top of that, they have shackled themselves with some of the most inane and restrictive laws imaginable, laws that leave you wondering what on earth they were thinking about. In Norway, for instance, it is illegal for a barman to serve you a fresh drink until you have finished the previous one. Does that sound to you like a matter that needs to be covered by legislation? It is also illegal in Norway for a bakery to bake bread on a Sat.u.r.day or Sunday. Well, thank G.o.d for that, say I. Think of the consequences if some ruthless Norwegian baker tried to foist fresh bread on people at the weekend. But the most preposterous law of all, a law so pointless as to scamper along the outer margins of the surreal, is the Swedish one that requires motorists to drive with their headlights on during the daytime, even on the sunniest summer afternoon. I would love to meet the guy who thought up that one. He must be head of the Department of Dreariness. It wouldn't surprise me at all if on my next visit to Sweden all the pedestrians are wearing miners' lamps.

I ended up dining in a Pizza Hut in the bas.e.m.e.nt of the shopping centre, the only customer in the place. I had forgotten to bring anything to read with me, so I pa.s.sed the time waiting for my pizza by staring thoughtfully at the emptiness around me, sipping a gla.s.s of water and making up Scandinavian riddles Q. How many Swedes does it take to paint a wall?A. Twenty-seven. One to do the painting and twenty-six to organize the spectators.Q. What does a Norwegian do when he wants to get high?A. He takes the filter off his cigarette.Q. What is the quickest way in Sweden of getting the riot police to your house?A. Don't take your library book back on time.Q. There are two staples in the Swedish diet. One is the herring. What is the other?A. The herring.Q. How do you recognize a Norwegian on a Mediterranean beach?A. He's the one in the snowshoes.

and chuckling quietly in the semi-demented manner of someone who finds himself sitting alone in damp clothes in an empty restaurant in a strange country waiting for a $25 pizza.

Afterwards, just to make an evening of it, I went to the station to purchase a ticket on the next morning's express to Stockholm. You cannot just hop onto a train in Sweden, but must think about it carefully and purchase a ticket in advance. The ticket hall had one of those systems where you take a number from a machine by the door and wait for it to appear above one of the ticket windows. My number was 415, and the highest number seeing action was 391. I waited for twenty minutes and the numbers advanced only to 393, so I wandered off to the station newsagent to look at girlie magazines. The newsagent, alas, was closed, so I looked at a couple of travel posters, and then wandered back. Not entirely to my surprise, I discovered that there had been a frenzy of activity in my absence, and number 415 had come and gone. So I took another number 432 this time and a seat and waited for half an hour. When at last my number came I presented myself at the window and asked the man for a ticket on the 10.05 to Stockholm the next morning.

He regarded me sadly. 'I'm sorry, I do not speak English,' he said.

I was taken aback. 'Everybody in Sweden speaks English,' I protested feebly.

His sadness grew. 'I don't. Please you must to go to window sree.' He indicated a window further down the line. 'She speaks vair good English.'

I went to window three and asked for a ticket to Stockholm the next morning. The woman, seeing the number 432 crumpled in my fist, pointed to the number above her window. 'You have the wrong number. This window is for number 436.' Even as she spoke a ferocious-looking lady with grey hair and a d.i.c.ky hip was hoisting herself out of her chair and charging towards me. I tried to explain my problem with the monoglot at window five, but the ticket lady just shook her head and said, 'You must take another ticket. Then maybe I will call you. Now I must deal with this lady.'

'You are at zer wrong window!' the old lady announced in the bellow of someone whose hearing is going. 'This is my my window,' she added, and tossed a haughty look to the rest of the room as if to say, Are foreigners stupid as s.h.i.+t, or what? window,' she added, and tossed a haughty look to the rest of the room as if to say, Are foreigners stupid as s.h.i.+t, or what?

Forlornly I shuffled over to the machine and took another number. In fact, I took three I figured this would give me some insurance then retired to a new seat to watch the board. What a lot of fun I was having! Eventually my number came around again. It directed me to return to window number five home of the only man in Sweden who speaks no English. I crumpled this ticket and waited for the next to be called. But he called the next one, too. I scampered to his window and begged him not to call my remaining number, but he did.

I couldn't bear to start the whole thing all over again. 'Please,' I said, speaking carefully, 'I just want a one-way ticket to Stockholm for tomorrow morning at 10.05.'

'Certainly,' he said, as if he had never seen me before, took my money and gave me a ticket. It's no wonder so many Swedes kill themselves.

12. Stockholm

In the morning it was still raining, and I gave up hope of exploring Gothenburg before catching my train. Instead I went to the station and spent my children's inheritance on two cups of coffee and a leaden iced bun. The train left promptly at 10.05 and after four hours and twenty minutes of riding through the endless pine forest that is Sweden, I was making my way through the throngs at Stockholm's pleasantly gloomy central station.

I went to the station tourist office to have a room found for me. I had to fill out a form with about 700 questions on it, but it was worth it because the hotel, the Castle on Riddargatan, about a mile from the station, was a charming little find, friendly, clean, and reasonably priced in so far as that statement can be made about anything in Sweden.

I headed first for Gamla Stan, the old town, on the far side of the Strombron bridge. It had an oddly Central European feel to it: narrow, hilly streets lined by severe, heavy buildings the colour of faded terracotta, sometimes with chunks of plaster missing, as if they had been struck a glancing blow by tank fire, and often with pieces knocked off the corners where trucks had carelessly backed into them. It had a kind of knocked-about charm, but was surprisingly lacking in any air of prosperity. Most of the windows were dirty, the bra.s.s name plates and door knockers were generally unpolished, and almost every building was in serious need of a good coat of paint. It looked much as I would expect Cracow or Bratislava to look. Maybe it was just the rain, which was falling steadily again, bringing its inevitable grey gloom to the city. Did it never stop raining in Sweden?

I walked with shoulders hunched and eyes cast down, avoiding the water that rushed down the steep, slickly cobbled lanes, glancing in the windows of antique shops, wis.h.i.+ng I had a hat or an umbrella or a ticket to Bermuda. I retreated into a dark coffee shop, where I sat s.h.i.+vering, drinking a $3 cup of coffee with both hands, watching the rain through the window, and realized I had a cold coming on.

I returned to the hotel, had a lavishly steamy bath and a change of clothes and felt marginally better. I spent the closing hours of the afternoon studying a map of Stockholm and waiting for the weather to clear. At about five the sky brightened. I immediately pulled on my damp sneakers and went out to explore the streets between Norrmalmstorg, a nearby square, and Kungstradgrden, a small rectangular park that ran down to the waterfront. Everything was much better now. It was a Sat.u.r.day evening and the streets were full of people meeting friends or partners and repairing in high spirits to the little restaurants and bistros scattered around the neighbourhood.

Starving as ever, I looked carefully at several and finally selected what looked to be the cheeriest and most popular of all, a cavernous bistro overlooking Norrmalmstorg called Matpalatset. It was friendly and crowded and wonderfully warm and snug, but the food was possibly the worst I have ever had outside a hospital cafeteria a grey salad with watery cuc.u.mber and mushrooms that tasted of old newspaper, and a lasagne that was not so much cooked as scorched. Each time I poked it with my knife and fork, the lasagne recoiled as if I were tormenting it. I was quietly agog. Nowhere else in Europe could a place serve food this bad and stay in business, and yet people were queuing at the door. I ate it all because I was hungry and because it was costing me as much as a weekend in Brighton, but seldom have I felt more as if I were engaged in a simple refuelling exercise.

Afterwards I went for a long walk and felt more charitably disposed to Stockholm now that the rain had stopped. It really is an exceptionally beautiful city, more watery even than Venice, and with more parkland per person than any other city in Europe. It is built on fourteen islands and within a few miles of the city there are 25,000 more, almost all of them dotted with cottages into which the city drains its population every weekend. I walked far out onto the broad and leafy avenues and narrower side streets to the north of the downtown, all of them lined with six-storey apartment buildings, stern and stolid and yet oddly homy, and at least three-quarters of the windows were darkened. It must be a burglar's paradise between Friday evening and Sunday afternoon.

I grew up wanting to live in buildings like these. It needn't necessarily have been in Europe it could have been in Buenos Aires or Dar es Salaam, say but it had to be in the midst of a big foreign city, full of noises and smells and sights unknown in Iowa. Even now I find myself drawn to these neighbourhoods and able to walk for hours through their anonymous streets, which is what I did now, and I returned to the city centre feeling pleased with Stockholm and content everywhere but in my stomach.

I pa.s.sed the cinema on Sveavagen where Olof Palme, the Prime Minister, was gunned down in March 1986. He had walked with his wife from their flat nearby to see a movie about Mozart and they had just emerged from the cinema to stroll home when some madman stepped from the shadows and shot him. It seemed to me one of the tragedies of our age because this must have been almost the last important place in the world where a prime minister could be found walking the streets unguarded and standing in movie lines just like a normal person.

The Swedish police did not exactly distinguish themselves. Palme was killed at 11.21 p.m., but the order to watch the roads didn't go out until 12.50 and even then the police in patrol cars weren't told what they were looking for, and the airports were not closed until 1.05 a.m. The police cordoned off a large area outside the cinema and brought in forensic experts to make a minute search of the scene, but both of the a.s.sa.s.sin's bullets were picked up and handed in by pa.s.sers-by. A 300-member police unit spent eleven months and $6 million investigating the murder before finally arresting an innocent man. They still don't know who did it.

I strolled aimlessly along Kungsgatan, one of the main shopping streets, past the PUB department store where Greta Garbo used to work in the millinery department, and along the long pedestrian shopping street called Drottninggatan, and felt as if I were entering a different city. Drottninggatan is a mile and a half of concrete charmlessness, and it was awash with rain-sodden litter. There were drunks everywhere, too, stumbling about. I paused to look in some shop window and realized after a moment that a middle-aged man a few yards to my right was peeing down the front of it, as discreetly as he could on a lighted street, which wasn't very discreetly at all. He was seriously intoxicated, but he had a suit on and looked prosperous and educated, and I felt immensely disappointed in him, and in all the hundreds of people who had dropped hamburger boxes and crisp packets all over the streets. This was unworthy of the Swedes. I expected better than that.

I grew up admiring Sweden because it managed to be rich and socialist at the same time, two things I believe everyone ought to be. Coming from a country where no one seemed to think it particularly disgraceful that a child with a brain tumour could be sent home to die because his father didn't have the wherewithal to pay a surgeon, or where an insurance company could be permitted by a state insurance commissioner to cancel the policies of its 14,000 sickest patients because it wasn't having a very good year (as happened in California in 1989), it seemed to me admirable beyond words that a nation could dedicate itself to providing equally and fairly for everyone, whatever the cost.

Not only that, but the Swedes managed to be rich and successful as well, unlike Britain, say, where the primary goal of socialists always seemed to be to make everyone as poor and backward as a shop steward in a British Leyland factory. For years, Sweden was to me the perfect society. It was hard enough to come to terms with the fact that the price to be paid for this was a scandalously high cost of living and an approach to life that had all the gusto of an undertakers' convention, but to find now that there was litter everywhere and educated people peeing on shop fronts was almost too much.

Still starving, I stopped at a mobile fast-food stand near the waterfront and paid a small fortune for the sort of hamburger that leaves you wondering if this could mark the start of a long period on a life-support machine. To say that it was c.r.a.ppy would be to malign faeces. I ate a third of it and dropped the rest in a bin. The rain began to fall again. On top of that my cold was growing worse. I returned to my room in grim spirits.

I woke with my head full of snot and my sneakers full of water, but Stockholm looked better than ever. The sun was out, the air was clean and crisp, more like late October than early April, and the water of the harbour sparkled, as blue as a swimming pool. I walked along Strandvagen, a grand residential boulevard with the boat-lined harbour on one side and imposing apartment houses on the other, out towards Djurgrden, an island given over entirely to parkland in the midst of the city. It is the most wonderful place.

Essentially it is just a city park full of gra.s.sy knolls and woodland, but scattered through it are all kinds of diversions a museum of Nordic life, a funfair, a permanent circus, a 'Komedie Teatern', a biological museum, a vast open-air museum called Skansen, a technological museum, and much else. Everything was just stirring to life when I arrived. Kiosk awnings outside Skansen were being cranked into place, chairs were being set out at little open-air cafes, ticket booths readied for the happy crowds that would soon be arriving.

I pushed on into the depths of the island, warmed by the morning suns.h.i.+ne. Every couple of hundred yards the road would branch into three or four side roads and whichever one I took would lead through some new and captivating landscape a view across the water to the green copper roofs of the downtown, a statue of some hero named Gustavus or Adolphus or both astride a prancing horse, a wooded dell full of infant leaves and shafts of golden suns.h.i.+ne. Occasionally I would pa.s.s things I wouldn't expect to find in a public park a boarding school, the Italian emba.s.sy, even some grand and very beautiful wooden houses on a hill above the harbour.

One of the many wonderful things about European cities is how often they have parks like Tivoli, the Bois de Boulogne, the Prater in Vienna that are more than just parks, that are places where you can not only go for fresh air and a stroll, but also go for a decent meal or visit an amus.e.m.e.nt park or explore some interesting observatory or zoo or museum. Djurgrden is possibly the finest of them all. I spent half a day there, making a lazy circuit of the island, constantly pausing, knuckles on hips, to survey the views, having a coffee outside Skansen, watching the families arriving, and came away admiring Stockholm all over again.

I walked back into the city to Drottninggatan, and it didn't look half so bad in the spring suns.h.i.+ne. Two street-sweeping machines were collecting up the Sat.u.r.day-night litter, which I was heartened to see, though in fact they were only playing at it because anything that was in a doorway or under a bench or trapped against a wall or in any of the hundreds of other places where most litter ends up was beyond the reach of the machines' brushes, so they left behind as much as they gathered up. And people pa.s.sing by were already depositing fresh litter in their wake.

I thought I would treat myself to an English newspaper and I needed some tissues for my leaking nose, but there were no shops open anywhere that I could see. Stockholm must be the deadest city in Europe on a Sunday. I stopped for coffee at a McDonald's and helped myself to about seventy-five napkins, then strolled over a low bridge to Skeppsholmen and Kastellholmen, two lovely, sleeping islands in the harbour, and thence back to Gamla Stan, now magically transformed by the suns.h.i.+ne. The mustard-and ochre-coloured buildings seemed positively to glow and the deep shadows in the doorways and windows gave everything a texture and richness it had entirely lacked the day before.

I made a circuit of the colossal royal palace (and I mean colossal it has 600 rooms), which may be one of the most boring buildings ever constructed. I don't mean that it is ugly or unpleasant. It is just boring, featureless, like the buildings children make by cutting window-holes in cardboard boxes. Still, I enjoyed the sentries, who must be the most engagingly wimpish-looking in the world. Sweden has been at peace for 150 years and remains determinedly unmilitaristic, so I suppose they don't want their soldiers to look too macho and ferocious; as a result they make them wear a white helmet that looks disarmingly like a bathing cap, and white spats straight out of Donald Duck. It's very hard not to go up to one of them and say, sotto voce out of the side of the mouth, 'You know, Lars, you look quite quite ridiculous.' ridiculous.'

I walked back down the hill to the waterfront and crossed the Strombron bridge, stopping midway to lean on the railing and be hypnotized once again by the view of bridges, islands and water. As I stood there a raindrop from out of nowhere struck me on the head, and then another and another.

I looked up to see a turmoil of grey clouds rolling in from the west. Within seconds the sky was black and the rain was in a sudden freefall. People who a moment before had been walking lazily hand in hand in the mild suns.h.i.+ne were now das.h.i.+ng for cover with newspapers over their heads. I stayed where I was, too dumbfounded by the fickleness of the Swedish weather to move, staring out over the now grey, rain-studded water, blowing my nose expansively on McDonald's napkins and thinking in pa.s.sing that if there were a market for snot I could be a very wealthy man. At length I gazed up at the unkind sky and took an important decision.

I was going to Rome.

13. Rome

Well, I'm sorry. I had intended to reach Rome as you would expect me to, in a logical, systematic way, progressing diligently down the length of Germany, through Austria and Switzerland, across a corner of France and finally arriving, dusty and weary and in desperate need of a launderette, by way of Lombardy and Tuscany. But after nearly a month beneath the endlessly damp skies of northern Europe, I longed for suns.h.i.+ne. It was as simple as that. I wanted to walk down a street in s.h.i.+rtsleeves, to sit out of doors with a cappuccino, to feel the sun on my face. So it was with only the odd wrenching spasm of guilt that I abandoned my planned itinerary and bounded with a single leap across 1,500 miles of Europe. Travelling is more fun s.h.i.+t, life is more fun if you can treat it as a series of impulses.

I hadn't been to Rome before, but I had been wanting to go there for about as long as I could remember, certainly since I first saw La Dolce Vita La Dolce Vita as a teenager. I love Italian movies, especially the truly crummy ones the ones that are dubbed by people who bravely refuse to let a total absence of acting skills stand in the way of a good career. They always star Giancarlo Giannini and the delectable Ornella Muti and have t.i.tles that tell you just how bad they are going to be as a teenager. I love Italian movies, especially the truly crummy ones the ones that are dubbed by people who bravely refuse to let a total absence of acting skills stand in the way of a good career. They always star Giancarlo Giannini and the delectable Ornella Muti and have t.i.tles that tell you just how bad they are going to be A A Night Full of Rain, That Summer in Naples, When Spring Comes Night Full of Rain, That Summer in Naples, When Spring Comes so you have no anxieties that you will be distracted by plots and can concentrate instead on the two important things, namely waiting for Ornella Muti to shed her clothes and looking at the scenery. Italian films are always full of good background shots usually of Ornella and Giancarlo riding a buzzing Vespa past the Colosseum and the Piazza Navona and the other tourist sights of Rome on the way to having either a brisk bonk or a soulful discussion about how they can't go on like this, usually because one of them is living with Marcello Mastroianni. so you have no anxieties that you will be distracted by plots and can concentrate instead on the two important things, namely waiting for Ornella Muti to shed her clothes and looking at the scenery. Italian films are always full of good background shots usually of Ornella and Giancarlo riding a buzzing Vespa past the Colosseum and the Piazza Navona and the other tourist sights of Rome on the way to having either a brisk bonk or a soulful discussion about how they can't go on like this, usually because one of them is living with Marcello Mastroianni.

Movies everywhere used to be full of this kind of local colour every film shot in Britain in the 1960s was required by law, if I am not mistaken, to show four laughing swingers in an open-topped Morgan roadster crossing Tower Bridge, filmed from a helicopter at a dizzy angle but now everyone but the Italians seems to have abandoned the practice, which I think is a huge pity because my whole notion of the world was shaped by the background scenes in films like To Catch a Thief To Catch a Thief and and Breathless Breathless and and Three Coins in a Fountain Three Coins in a Fountain and even the Inspector Clouseau movies. If I hadn't seen these pictures, I would be living in Peoria now and thinking that that was about as rich as life gets. and even the Inspector Clouseau movies. If I hadn't seen these pictures, I would be living in Peoria now and thinking that that was about as rich as life gets.

Rome was as wonderful as I had hoped it would be, certainly a step up from Peoria. It was everything Stockholm was not warm, sunny, relaxed, lively, full of good food and cheap drink. I went to dinner on the first night with an American expatriate friend who had lived there for twenty years and he complained the whole time about how expensive and impossible it had become, but it seemed wonderfully cheap after Stockholm and in any case, as I asked him, how could you sit in the open air on a warm evening eating a splendid meal and b.i.t.c.h about anything at all?

'Sure, sure, but you should try to get your plumbing fixed,' he said, as if that settled everything. After dinner he took me on a brisk walk around the city and showed me how everything had deteriorated how the bars of the Via Veneto had no cla.s.s any longer and were full of German and American tourists too stupid and sluggish to know that they were being mercilessly ripped off, how Rugantino's, the nightclub near the Spanish Steps made famous by La Dolce Vita, La Dolce Vita, is now a McDonald's, how some once-charming restaurant or hotel had been vandalized by tasteless proprietors whose only motivation was greed. is now a McDonald's, how some once-charming restaurant or hotel had been vandalized by tasteless proprietors whose only motivation was greed.

I listened, but I didn't hear. Everything seemed wonderful to me, even the monumentally impa.s.sive waiters, even the cab drivers, even the particular cab driver who bilked me out of the better part of 30,000 lire the pricehe quoted to take me from Roma-Termini to my hotel, without bothering to inform me that it was two and a half blocks away and could be walked in thirty seconds because he did it with such simplicity and charm, forgiving me my stupidity for letting him do this to me. I was so touched that I tipped him.

My hotel was in a battered, out-at-the-elbow district just off the Via Cavour it was the sort of neighbourhood where you could pee on the buildings and it would be all right but it had the compensating virtue of being central. You could walk anywhere in the city from there, and that's what I did, day after day, just walked and walked. I rose daily just after dawn, during that perfect hour when the air still has a fresh, unused feel to it, and watched the city come awake whistling shopkeepers slopping out, sweeping up, pulling down awnings, pus.h.i.+ng up shutters.

I walked through the gardens of the Villa Borghese, up and down the Spanish Steps, window-shopped along the Via dei Condotti, admired the Colosseum and Forum, crossed the river by the Isola Tiberina to tramp the hilly streets of Trastevere, and wandered up to the lofty heights of the Gianicolo, where the views across the city were sensational and where young couples entwined themselves in steamy embraces on the narrow ledges. The Italians appear to have devised a way of having s.e.x without taking their clothes off and they were going at it hammer and tongs up here. I had an ice-cream and watched to see how many of them tumbled over the edge to dash themselves on the rocks below, but none did, thank goodness. They must wear suction cups on their backs.

For a week, I just walked and walked. I walked till my feet steamed. And when I tired I sat with a coffee or sunned myself on a bench, until I was ready to walk again.

Having said this, Rome is not an especially good city for walking. For one thing, there is the constant danger that you will be run over. Zebra crossings count for nothing in Rome, which is not unexpected but takes some getting used to. It is a shock to be strolling across some expansive boulevard, lost in an idle fantasy involving Ornella Muti and a vat of Jell-O, when suddenly it dawns on you that the six lanes of cars bearing down upon you at speed have no intention of stopping.

It isn't that they want to hit you, as they do in Paris, but they just will hit you. This is partly because Italian drivers pay no attention to anything happening on the road ahead of them. They are too busy tooting their horns, gesturing wildly, preventing other vehicles from cutting into their lane, making love, smacking the children in the back seat and eating a sandwich the size of a baseball bat, often all at once. So the first time they are likely to notice you is in the rear-view mirror as something lying in the road behind them.

Even if they do see you, they won't stop. There is nothing personal in this. It's just that they believe that if something is in the way they must move it, whether it is a telephone pole or a visitor from the Middle West. The only exception to this is nuns. Even Roman drivers won't hit a nun you see groups of them breezing across eight-lane arteries with the most amazing impunity, like sc.r.a.ps of black and white paper borne along by the wind so if you wish to cross some busy place like the Piazza Venezia your only hope is to wait for some nuns to come along and stick to them like a sweaty T-s.h.i.+rt.

I love the way the Italians park. You turn any street corner in Rome and it looks as if you've just missed a parking compet.i.tion for blind people. Cars are pointed in every direction, half on the pavements and half off, facing in, facing sideways, blocking garages and side streets and phone boxes, fitted into s.p.a.ces so tight that the only possible way out would be through the sun roof. Romans park their cars the way I would park if I had just spilled a beaker of hydrochloric acid on my lap.

I was strolling along the Via Sistina one morning when a Fiat Croma shot past and screeched to a smoky halt a hundred feet up the road. Without pause the driver lurched into reverse and came barrelling backwards down the street in the direction of a parking s.p.a.ce that was precisely the length of his Fiat, less two and a half feet. Without slowing even fractionally, he veered the car into the s.p.a.ce and crashed resoundingly into a parked Renault.

Nothing happened for a minute. There was just the hiss of escaping steam. Then the driver leaped from his car, gazed in profound disbelief at the devastation before him crumpled metal, splintered tail lights, the exhaust pipe of his own car limply grazing the pavement and regarded it with as much mystification as if it had dropped on him from the sky. Then he did what I suppose almost any Italian would do. He kicked the Renault in the side as hard as he could, denting the door, punis.h.i.+ng its absent owner for having the gall to park it there, then leaped back in his Fiat and drove off as madly as he had arrived, and peace returned once again to the Via Sistina, apart from the occasional clank of a piece of metal dropping off the stricken Renault. No one but me batted an eye.

Italians will park anywhere. All over the city you see them bullying their cars into s.p.a.ces about the size of a sofa cus.h.i.+on, holding up traffic and prompting every driver within three miles to lean on his horn and give a pa.s.sable imitation of a man in an electric chair. If the opening is too small for a car, the Romans will decorate it with litter an empty cigarette packet, a wedge of half-eaten pizza, twenty-seven cigarette b.u.t.ts, half an ice-cream cone with an ooze of old ice-cream emerging from the bottom, danced on by a delirium of flies, an oily tin of sardines, a tattered newspaper and something truly unexpected, like a tailor's dummy or a dead goat.

Even the litter didn't especially disturb me. I know Rome is dirty and crowded and the traffic is impossible, but in a strange way that's part of the excitement. Rome is the only city I know, apart from New York, that you can say that about. In fact, New York is just what Rome reminded me of it had the same noise, dirt, volubility, honking, the same indolent cops standing around with nothing to do, the same way of talking with one's hands, the same unfocused electric buzz of energy. The only difference is that Rome is so wondrously chaotic. New York is actually pretty well ordered. People stand patiently in queues and for the most part obey traffic signals and observe the conventions of life that keep things running smoothly.

Italians are entirely without any commitment to order. They live their lives in a kind of pandemonium, which I find very attractive. They don't queue, they don't pay their taxes, they don't turn up for appointments on time, they don't undertake any sort of labour without a small bribe, they don't believe in rules at all. On Italian trains every window bears a label telling you in three languages not to lean out of the window. The labels in French and German instruct you not to lean out, but in Italian they merely suggest that it might not be a good idea. It could hardly be otherwise.

Even kidnappers in Italy can be amazingly casual. In January 1988, a gang of them kidnapped an eighteen-year-old named Carlo Celadon. They put him in a six-foot-deep pit in the earth and fed him, but they didn't bother sending a ransom demand until listen to this the following October, nine months after they took him. Can you believe that? The kidnappers demanded five billion lire (2.5 million) and the desperate parents immediately paid up, but the kidnappers then asked for more money. This time the parents balked. Eventually, two years and 100 days after they took him, the kidnappers released him.

At the time of my visit, the Italians were working their way through their forty-eighth government in forty-five years. The country has the social structure of a banana republic, yet the amazing thing is that it thrives. It is now the fifth biggest economy in the world, world, which is a simply staggering achievement in the face of such chronic disorder. If they had the work ethic of the j.a.panese they could be masters of the planet. Thank goodness they haven't. They are too busy expending their considerable energies on the pleasurable minutiae of daily life children, good food, arguing in cafes which is just how it should be. which is a simply staggering achievement in the face of such chronic disorder. If they had the work ethic of the j.a.panese they could be masters of the planet. Thank goodness they haven't. They are too busy expending their considerable energies on the pleasurable minutiae of daily life children, good food, arguing in cafes which is just how it should be.

I was in a neighbourhood bar on the Via Marsala one morning when three workmen in blue boiler suits came in and stopped for coffees at the counter. After a minute one of them started thumping another emphatically on the chest, haranguing him about something, while the third flailed his arms, made mournful noises and staggered about as if his airway were obstructed, and I thought that at any moment knives would come out and there would be blood everywhere, until it dawned on me that all they were talking about was the quality of Schillaci's goal against Belgium the night before or the mileage on a Fiat Tipo or something equally innocuous, and after a minute they drained their coffees and went off together as happy as anything.

What a wonderful country.

I went one morning to the Mus...o...b..rghese. I knew from a newspaper clipping that it had been shut in 1985 for two years of repairs the villa was built on catacombs and for years has been slowly collapsing in on itself but when I got there it was still covered in scaffolding and fenced off with warped and flimsy sheets of corrugated iron and looked to be nowhere near ready for the public this a mere five years after it was shut and three years after its forecast reopening. This is the sort of constant unreliability that must be exasperating to live with (especially if you left your umbrella in the cloak-room the day before it shut), but you quickly take it as an inevitable part of life, like the weather in England.

The care of the nation's cultural heritage is not, it must be said, Italy's strong suit. The country spends $200 million a year on maintenance and restoration, which seems a reasonable sum until it is brought to your attention that that is less than the cost of a dozen new miles of highway, and a fraction of what was spent on stadiums for the 1990 World Cup. Altogether it is less than 0.2 per cent of the national budget. As a result, two-thirds of the nation's treasures are locked away in warehouses or otherwise denied to the public, and many others are crumbling away for want of attention in March 1989, for instance, the 900-year-old civic tower of Pavia collapsed, just keeled over, killing four people and there are so many treasures lying around that thieves can just walk off with them. In 1989 alone almost 13,000 works of art were taken from the country's museums and churches, and as I write some 90,000 works of art are missing. Eighty per cent of all the art thefts in Europe take place in Italy.

This casual att.i.tude to the national heritage is something of a tradition in Rome. For a thousand years, usually with the blessings of the Roman Catholic Church (which had a share in the profits and a lot to answer for generally, if you ask me), builders and architects looked upon the city's ancient baths, temples and other timeless monuments as quarries. The Colosseum isn't the hulking ruin it is today because of the ravages of time, but because for hundreds of years people knocked chunks from it with sledgehammers and carted them off to nearby lime kilns to turn into cement. When Bernini needed a load of bronze to build his sumptuous baldachino in St Peter's, it was stripped from the roof of the Pantheon. It is a wonder that any of ancient Rome survives at all.

Deprived of the opportunity to explore the interior of the Borghese, I wandered instead through the surrounding gardens, now the city's largest and handsomest public park, full of still glades and piercing shafts of sunlight, and enjoyed myself immensely, except for one startled moment when I cut through a wooded corner and encountered a rough-looking man squatted down c.r.a.pping against a tree, regarding me dolefully. I hadn't thought about this much before, but Europeans do seem to have a peculiar fondness for alfresco excretion. Along any highway in France or Belgium you can see somebody standing beside a parked car having a whizz in the bushes only a foot from the road. In America these people would be taken away and beaten. And in Paris you can still find those extraordinary p.i.s.soirs, gun-metal-grey barriers which are designed to let the whole world see who's in there and what he's doing. I could never understand why we pa.s.sers-by had to be treated to the sight of the occupant's lower legs and upper body. Why couldn't they build the sides six feet high? If a guy went in there we knew what he was doing; we didn't have to keep an eye on him, did we?

I remember once watching a man and two women office colleagues on their way to lunch, I guessed carrying on an animated three-way conversation while the man was standing in one of these contraptions. It seemed very odd to me that they were talking as if nothing extraordinary was going on. In England, if such a thing as a p.i.s.soir existed, the women would have turned away and talked between themselves, affecting not to be aware of what their colleague was up to in there. But then, according to Reay Tannahill's s.e.x in History, s.e.x in History, in eighteenth-century France aristocratic men and women thought nothing of going to the toilet together, and sometimes would repair en ma.s.se to the privy after dinner in order not to interrupt their lively discussions. I think this explains a lot about the French. As for the Italians, in the working-cla.s.s argot of Rome if you see an acquaintance on the street, you do not say 'How are you?' or 'How's it going?' but 'Had a good c.r.a.p today?' Honestly. in eighteenth-century France aristocratic men and women thought nothing of going to the toilet together, and sometimes would repair en ma.s.se to the privy after dinner in order not to interrupt their lively discussions. I think this explains a lot about the French. As for the Italians, in the working-cla.s.s argot of Rome if you see an acquaintance on the street, you do not say 'How are you?' or 'How's it going?' but 'Had a good c.r.a.p today?' Honestly.

And at the end of that enlightening digression, let us make our way to the Vatican City and St Peter's the world's largest church in its smallest country, as many a guidebook has observed. I had always thought of the Vatican City as being ancient, but in fact as an inst.i.tution it dates only from 1929, when Mussolini and the Pope signed the Lateran Treaty. I arrived wondering vaguely if I would have to pa.s.s through some sort of border control and pay a steep fee, but in fact the only obstacle I encountered were two dozen jabbering men all trying to sell me slide strips or take my photograph with a Polaroid. I directed them to a lady in a Denver Broncos warm-up jacket fifteen feet away saying that she was my wife and had all my money, and they all rushed off to her and I was thus able to cross the great piazza unmolested, pausing only to attach myself briefly to an American tour group, where I learned the aforementioned fact about Mussolini and the Lateran Treaty and was informed which balcony the Pope would come out on if he were going to come out, which he wasn't. This was interesting stuff and I would have stayed with them longer, but the guide quickly spotted me because I wasn't wearing a baseball cap, a warm-up jacket and trousers in one of the livelier primary colours. She informed me that this was a private party, and clearly wasn't going to continue until I had slunk off.

St Peter's doesn't look all that fabulous from the outside, not at least from the piazza at its foot, but step inside and it's so sensational that your mouth falls open whether you want it to or not. It is a marvel, so vast and beautiful and cool and filled with treasures and airy heights and pale beams of heavenly light that you don't know where to place your gaze. It is the only building I have ever been in where I have felt like sinking to my knees, clasping my hands heavenward and crying, 'Take me home, Lord.' No structure on earth would ever look the same to me again.

I wandered down the wide central aisle, agog at the scale of the place. It is 730 feet long, 364 feet wide and 438 feet from the floor to the top of the dome. But as Mark Twain noted in The Innocents Abroad, The Innocents Abroad, the trouble is that because every bit of it is built to such a scale you have to remind yourself continually of its immensity. The four grand pillars that support the dome don't look that mighty in such a setting until you find yourself backing up to one and suddenly realize that it is fifty feet wide, and the baldachino does indeed look, as Twain said, like nothing more than a magnified bedstead, but it is more than half as high as Niagara Falls. It was only when I looked back down the length of the church to where more visitors were coming in, and I saw that they were like insects, that I had a sudden, crus.h.i.+ng sense of just how big this place was. It occurred to me, too, that although the building was nearly silent and seemed almost empty every clutch of visitors had an area of floor s.p.a.ce about the size of a football field there were none the less hundreds and hundreds of us in there. the trouble is that because every bit of it is built to such a scale you have to remind yourself continually of its immensity. The four grand pillars that support the dome don't look that mighty in such a setting until you find yourself backing up to one and suddenly realize that it is fifty feet wide, and the baldachino does indeed look, as Twain said, like nothing more than a magnified bedstead, but it is more than half as high as Niagara Falls. It was only when I looked back down the length of the church to where more visitors were coming in, and I saw that they were like insects, that I had a sudden, crus.h.i.+ng sense of just how big this place was. It occurred to me, too, that although the building was nearly silent and seemed almost empty every clutch of visitors had an area of floor s.p.a.ce about the size of a football field there were none the less hundreds and hundreds of us in there.

I had a look at the 'Pieta' in a side vault behind a gla.s.s screen and a barrier that keeps you so far back you can barely see it, which seemed a bit harsh just because some madman attacked it once years ago then went to the Sistine Chapel and the museums, and they were naturally impressive, but I confess that all visual experiences were largely wasted on me after the s.p.a.cious grandeur of St Peter's.

I walked back towards the neighbourhood of my hotel along the Via della Conciliazione and was pleased to find the street crowded with souvenir shops. I have a certain weakness for tacky memorabilia, and in my experience no place is more reliable in this regard than shops specializing in religious curios. Once in Council Bluffs, Iowa, I agonized for an hour over whether to pay $49.95 for a back-lit electric portrait of Christ which when switched on gave the appearance of blood flowing perpetually from his wounds, before finally concluding that it was too tasteless even for me and at any rate I couldn't afford it. So I thought I might find some suitably tasteless compensation here crucifix corn-on-the-cob holders or a Nativity pen and pencil set or a musical 'Last Supper' toilet-roll holder or at the very least a crucifix paperweight that said MY DAD WENT TO THE VATICAN CITY AND ALL HE BROUGHT ME WAS THIS LOUSY CRUCIFIX MY DAD WENT TO THE VATICAN CITY AND ALL HE BROUGHT ME WAS THIS LOUSY CRUCIFIX. But all the shops sold a more or less identical a.s.sortment of rosary beads, crucifixes in 120 sizes, plaster models of the basilica and Pope John Paul dinner plates, none of them in remotely bad taste (unless you really went to town and bought a dozen papal plates for use at dinner parties, but that would cost a fortune), and so I trudged on. One of the worst parts about living in the 1990s is that c.r.a.ppy souvenirs are so so hard to find these days. hard to find these days.

On my final morning I called at the Capuchin monks' mausoleum in the church of Santa Maria della Concezione on the busy Piazza Barberini. This I cannot recommend highly enough. In the sixteenth century some monk had the inspired idea of taking the bones of his fellow monks when they died and using them to decorate the place. Is that rich enough for you? Half a dozen gloomy chambers along one side of the church were filled with such attractions as an altar made of rib cages, shrines meticulously concocted from skulls and leg bones, ceilings trimmed with forearms, wall rosettes fas.h.i.+oned from vertebrae, chandeliers made from the bones of hands and feet. In the odd corner there stood a complete skeleton of a Capuchin monk dressed like the Grim Reaper in his hooded robe, and ranged along the other wall were signs in six languages with such cheery sentiments as WE WERE LIKE YOU. YOU WILL BE LIKE WE WERE LIKE YOU. YOU WILL BE LIKE us, and a long poem engagingly called 'My Mother Killed Me!!'. These guys must have been a barrel of laughs to be around. You can imagine every time you got the flu some guy coming along with a tape measure and a thoughtful expression. us, and a long poem engagingly called 'My Mother Killed Me!!'. These guys must have been a barrel of laughs to be around. You can imagine every time you got the flu some guy coming along with a tape measure and a thoughtful expression.

Four thousand monks contributed to the display between 1528 and 1870 when the practice was stopped for being just too tacky for words. No one knows quite why or by whom the designs were made, but the inescapable impression you are left with is that the Capuchins once harboured in their midst a half-mad monk with time on his hands and a certain pa.s.sion for tidiness. It is certainly a nice little money spinner for the church. A constant stream of tourists came in, happy to pay over a stack of lire for the morbid thrill of it all. My only regret, predictably, was that they didn't have a gift shop where you could purchase a boxed set of vertebrae napkin rings, say, or back scratchers made from real arms and hands, but it was becoming obvious that in this respect I was to be thwarted at every turn in Rome.