Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
unarresting items from behind plate-glass windows. It was simply that I was no longer in Italy, which caused
me a passing pang of grief. This is the problem with travelling: one day you are sitting with a cappuccino on
a terrace by the sea and the next you are standing in the rain in the dullest town in Switzerland looking at
Zanussis.
It dawned on me that I hadn't seen a refrigerator, vacuum cleaner or other truly functional thing on sale
anywhere in Italy. I presume they don't all drive to Brig to buy them, that they must be able to purchase them
somewhere in their own country, but I couldn't recall seeing any. In Brig, however, there was nothing else. I
walked the empty streets trying to work up an interest in white goods, but the mood wouldn't take me, and I
retired instead to the bar of my hotel, where I drank some beer and read Philip Ziegler's classic account of
the black death, imaginatively entitled
The Black Death -
just the thing for those lonely, rainy nights in a
foreign country.
Actually, it was fascinating, not least because it dealt with places I had just passed through - Florence,
for instance, where 100,000 people, half the populace, lost their lives in just four months, and Milan, where
the news from Florence so terrified the locals that families suspected of harbouring a victim were walled up
inside their houses.
There's nothing like reading about people being entombed alive to put your own problems in
perspective. I tend to think of life as bleak when I can't find a parking space at Sainsbury's, but imagine
what it must have been to be an Italian in the fourteenth century. For a start, in 1345 it rained non-stop for six
months, turning much of the country into a stagnant lake and making planting impossible. The economy
collapsed, banks went bust and thousands died in the ensuing famines. Two years later the country was
rocked with terrible earthquakes - in Rome, Naples, Pisa, Padua, Venice - which brought further death and
chaos. And then, just when people were surely thinking that things
had
to get better now, some anonymous
sailor stepped ashore at Genoa and said, 'You know, I don't feel so hot,' and within days the great plague
was beginning its long sweep across Europe.
And it didn't stop there. The plague returned for a mop-up operation in 1360-61, and yet again in
1368-69, 1371, 1375, 1390 and 1405. The odd thing to me is that this coincided with one of the great
periods of church-building in Europe. I don't know about you, but if I lived in an age when God was zinging
every third person in my town with suppurating bubos, I don't think I'd look on Him as being on my side.
In the morning I took a fast train to Geneva. We rattled through a succession of charmless industrial
towns - Sierra, Sion, Martigny - places that seemed to consist almost entirely of small factories and
industrial workshops fringed with oildrums, stacks of wooden pallets and other semi-abandoned clutter. I
had forgotten that quite a lot of Switzerland is really rather ugly. And everywhere there were pylons. I had
forgotten about those, too. The Swiss are great ones for stringing wires. They thread them across the
mountainsides for electricity and suspend them from endless rows of gibbets along every railway track and
hang them like washing lines on all their city streets for the benefit of trams. It seems not to have occurred to
them that there might be a more attractive way of arranging things.
We found the shore of Lake Geneva at Villeneuve and spent the next hour racing along its northern
banks at a speed that convinced me the driver was slumped dead on the throttle. We shot past the castle of
Chillon -
shoomp
: a picturesque blur - flew through the stations at Montreux and Vevey, scattering people
on the platforms, and finally screeched to a long, slow stop at Lausanne, where the body of the driver was
presumably taken away for recycling (I assume the fanatically industrious Swiss don't bury their dead but
use them for making heating oil) and his place taken by someone in better health. At all events, the final leg
into Geneva was made at a more stately pace.
Just outside my carriage were two young Australians who spent the passage from Lausanne to
Geneva discussing great brawls they had taken part in over the years. I couldn't quite see them, but I could
hear every breathless word. They would say things like, 'D'ya remember the time Muscles Malloy beat the
crap out of the Savage triplets with a claw hammer? There was blood and guts all over the place, man.'
'I was picking pieces of brain out of my beer!'
'Yeah, it was fan-tas-tic! D'ya remember that time Muscles rammed that snooker cue up Jason
Brewster's nose and it came out the top of his head?'
'That Muscles was an animal, wasn't he?'
