Next to the Shanghai is a place that seems to have been built entirely of blue tiles. It is the carabinieri’s very own bathing station, where the hard-working boys in uniform can come to relax off duty. Would the English police ever be granted their very own spot on the beach? And in prime space, too! I fear not. The carabinieri strut up and down the promenade in their splendid black trousers with the red stripes down the side, that Stefi says are only there to help them find their pockets. They usually go in pairs, as do the young girls here, and sometimes a pair of young girls arm in arm will salute a pair of young carabinieri side by side. There’s a sunny complacency as they all shake hands, a mood of self-congratulation. Michele and Stefi weave in and out, concentrating on the trajectories between manholes, shouting about all the enemy bases they are destroying, taking entirely for granted this balmy abundance of sun and colour and beauty.
‘How many computer games do you think there are along this front?’ I ask Michele, playing to his love of number and measure. ‘In all these bathing stations here. Come on, guess. And guess how many ice-creams there are in how many freezers.’
His eyes roll, almost causing him to have an accident. A smaller child was dragging a huge, inflated dolphin. But they’re already Italian enough to avoid each other, albeit at the cost of Michele having to put a foot down.
So, I’m just getting used to this luxury of shade and light, of canvas and painted wood and cement and vegetation — laurels, geraniums, oleanders — colour everywhere, this wealth of tables and lazy revelling, when all of a sudden… nothing…
Right in the middle of the town, there’s an empty space. Right where you feel there should be another Fellini set teeming with life… nothing but parapet, beach, sea. The impression we get, as we cycle past this hole, this vacuum, this anomaly, is that of a piece of desert some army has just retired from. TV images of Kuwait. There is litter everywhere — cans, foil, paper — and a thin sprinkling of bodies between, inert on the dirty sand, sprawled, as if slaughtered and stripped in enemy territory. A couple of dogs sniff about, a single white sunshade suggests surrender.
Why, the children want to know. Papà! Why is this ugly place allowed to exist right in the middle of town?
It’s the public beach, I explain, an area where anybody can go and lie down and perhaps even set up their own sunshade without having to rent one. It’s there by law, so that no one can say the beach is entirely privatised and denied to the very poor, or to those few so idiosyncratic as not to wish to be part of the group in the homely environment of their own deck chairs…
You don’t find many Italians on the public beach. Usually the people here are Germans or Scandinavians or British, unused to the idea of paying for beach space. Often there are foreign campers parked at the top. You see sleeping bags, even the circle of a small fire. Looking at all the litter, appreciating how rarely they must clean it, I suspect the place is deliberately made as unattractive as possible so as not to harm the business of the bathing stations, whose rent provides the local government with a steady income. But mostly the public beach shows you how the pleasures of Pescara are at least fifty percent manmade. Even under the splendidly azure sky, beach and sea alone are a wasteland.
Maria, fulgens maris stella
A kilometre on from the public beach, beyond all the bathing stations, are the river and the port. The road turns right, away from the front, to skirt an oily harbour bristling with scores of fishing boats. We turn left onto the jetty. The children have to get off their bikes here because the paving was broken up for works some years ago and has never been repaired. There was enough money to pay for a striking new monument, though. Indeed, it’s been visible for most of our ride: a needle, perhaps fifty feet high, in a combination of travertine and cement conglomerate, scaly and graceless, clumsy in a way you couldn’t imagine a needle could be clumsy. On top stands a concrete Madonna, the stiff folds of her gown streamlined to rocket fins, as if she were about to be blasted off into the sky. The monument was erected in the anno mariano — Mary’s Year — in 1954, and perhaps the paving was broken to bring in the materials, then never repaired. On the needle at eye level, black metal lettering announces:
Maria
Fulgens maris stella
Piscoriae tuere filios
Mary
Bright star of the sea
Watch over your sons the fishermen
But do the fishermen understand Latin? Cycling up the long jetty, you see the boats going in and out — Madre Teresa, Padre Mariano, Santa Margherita — and you wonder how strong these appeals for divine protection can be now that the vessels are big and motorized, some with automatic systems for lowering and raising the nets. San Pietro Pescatore, Santa Lucia… As they pass, wallowing in the first sea swell, the colour of many of the crewmen suggests a different faith, suggests the immigrants’ search for that exhausting work modern Europeans are abandoning. There are black men winding ropes, Moroccans hauling nets. Santa Rita, Santa Monica… Fleetingly, it crosses my mind that Italians have as yet made none of those concessions to other cultures the British have: turbans on ticket collectors and chadors in the nursery. Life’s bric-a-brac here is still solidly Catholic. But the sense of inertia is growing. The immigrants are milling at the train stations, and the Italians are mislaying their rosaries amongst the clutter of their economic success. I can’t help feeling that this powerful modern boat thrusting out into the Adriatic with its crew of North Africans was most likely called Santa Monica not out of devotion, but just because no-one can yet imagine any other way to name a fishing boat.
We ride along the jetty. To our right is the channel of water the boats and ships ply. The children try to read the Slav name of some cargo ship: the Nikolai something or other, there’s too much rust to read the second part. A hydrofoil that still ferries back and forth from Croatia is tied with bright blue ropes. But to the left things are even more interesting. Along the left side of the jetty piles of huge concrete blocks have been dropped haphazard into the sea to form a breakwater. Perched out on these blocks, encroaching just a yard or two onto the jetty, are a line of what I can only think to call giant shacks. Thrown together with sheets of plywood and corrugated iron, railway sleepers, blue tarpaulin, red sheet-metal, chunks of driftwood, old fences, road signs, they are almost house-size, a good two storeys high, projecting motley and improvised on drunken stakes out over the rocks. Above them rise poles and masts crisscrossed by an impressive schooner rigging of hawsers and stays supporting long sprits stretching out over the water.
The first time you see these shacks, from a distance, they look like a line of old wrecks come to grief miraculously upright and almost orderly on some sandbank exactly perpendicular to the shore. You expect that at any moment one or all will founder forever. In fact, they are old concessions, licences granted way back and handed down from father to son giving the exclusive right to fish from a designated stretch of pier. Complex pulley systems raise and lower nets from the sprits out over the water. But what strikes you most — as with the farms on the hills above Verona where barns lean on cherry trees and vines twist themselves along wires stretched between shed and pergola — what really perplexes you here, is the tangle of man and nature, the shamelessly makeshift that somehow lasts forever, perhaps because it has bedded itself in so well, in the rocks, in people’s minds.