Italian Ways – On and Off the Rails from Milan to Palermo - Couverture rigide

"All Italy is here, its history, its character, its flaws" (Sunday Times)

"A treat equivalent to a ride on the Orient Express" (Wall Street Journal)

"Like the best train journeys, you don’t want it to end" (New Statesman)

"A very funny hosanna to Italian railroad locomotion in all its rackety glory" (Evening Standard, Books of the Year)

"Parks has the keenest of eyes for the telling of amusing detail ... He remains the best interpreter of Italian ways in Italy" (Sunday Herald)

"Tim Parks has written a book about Italian railways that is engrossing, entertaining, and wonderfully revealing about the country and its people. It makes perfect armchair travelling – a delight from beginning to end" (David Lodge)

"The book is, as Tim Parks says, a search for the Italian character, which he evokes in dozens of gorgeously written scenes; but beyond that Parks is exploring the dynamic between tradition and innovation... Underneath everything, Parks is trying to come to a point of loving the world in all its confusion and frustration, and by the book's end he does, he does. Bravo" (David Shields)

"This latest peg on which to hang another ruminative book about the character of Italy provides Parks with a first-class ticket to ride as a lively, erudite raconteur in salty daily negotiation with what he calls a ‘dystopian paradise’" (Iain Finlayson The Times)

"With Paul Theroux apparently winding down, there might be an opening for Parks as a new laureate of international railways" (Andrew Martin Observer)

"Parks is also a railway enthusiast and this delightful book is the story of his love-hate relationship with Italian trains" (Literary Review)

Tim Parks s books on Italy have been hailed as "so vivid, so packed with delectable details, [they] serve as a more than decent substitute for the real thing" (Los Angeles Times Book Review). Now, in his first Italian travelogue in a decade, he delivers a charming and funny portrait of Italian ways by riding its trains from Verona to Milan, Rome to Palermo, and right down to the heel of Italy. Parks begins as any traveler might: "A train is a train is a train, isn t it?" But soon he turns his novelist s eye to the details, and as he journeys through majestic Milano Centrale station or on the newest high-speed rail line, he delivers a uniquely insightful portrait of Italy. Through memorable encounters with ordinary Italians conductors and ticket collectors, priests and prostitutes, scholars and lovers, gypsies and immigrants Parks captures what makes Italian life distinctive: an obsession with speed but an acceptance of slower, older ways; a blind eye toward brutal architecture amid grand monuments; and an undying love of a good argument and the perfect cappuccino. Italian Ways also explores how trains helped build Italy and how their development reflects Italians sense of themselves from Garibaldi to Mussolini to Berlusconi and beyond. Most of all, Italian Ways is an entertaining attempt to capture the essence of modern Italy. As Parks writes, "To see the country by train is to consider the crux of the essential Italian dilemma: Is Italy part of the modern world, or not?"