This is one of Parks’s more precise analyses of the mentality that kept Berlusconi afloat for so long, and, in this spring of political unrest, returned eighty-seven-year-old Giorgio Napolitano to leadership. Similarly, Parks spotlights another fundamental national trait, which anyone who lives long in Italy will recognize: unity in disunity. “Some tourists and ingenuous foreign journalists may imagine that there is a serious separatist movement here,” he writes, in reference to some aggressive regionalist graffiti. “But this is just a rhetorical flourish…. In every aspect of Italian life, one of the key characteristics to get to grips with is that this is a nation at ease with the distance between ideal and real. They are beyond what we call hypocrisy. Quite simply they do not register the contradiction between rhetoric and behavior.”

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Inevitably, the author’s rambles around the Italian peninsula mark interior shifts as well, a coming to terms with the place he so long ago chose as home. “There are plateaus, then sudden deepenings; all at once a corner is turned and you understand the country and your experience of it in a new way.” Accepting his bond with Italy also means that Parks must acknowledge the parameters of his role there, “never quite a native, but… no longer a stranger.”

Although he sometimes laments the fact that after so many years, Italians still don’t see him as one of them, he is aware that the whole nature of his present life and work is based on being an outsider, and that his deep instincts will always be those of his native land. In an ugly dispute with a conductor, he first makes a noisy scene that the young Italian passengers around him approve of, but he then returns consciously to his practical English ideas of civility. “To hang on in the train now, so that I could either boast before an appreciative audience that I had outwitted or faced down the inspector, or worse still so that I could plunge into a conflict that would engage my energies for months to come, would be to become more intensely and irretrievably Italian…. Surely the best thing to do, I decided, was to hurry to the university and get on with my Englishman’s life in Italy.”

And Italy still holds surprises for the Englishman. In Puglia, after a rather disheartening Trenitalia journey from north to south, where the magnificence of the landscape is blighted by pollution and decay, Parks is thrilled when he chances upon an unknown treasure: Le Ferrovie del Sud Est. This tiny, enchanting railroad company is completely independent of the woeful Ferrovie dello Stato, running on its own clean tracks and quirky schedule through one unspoiled seaside village after another—a kind of train lover’s Shangri-La.

Like all of Parks’s books, “Italian Ways” has frequent longueurs, when one yearns for a merciless editor to dispel the sense of being stuck next to an unbearably gabby fellow traveller (an experience, ironically, that Parks laments elsewhere). But there’s also a dreamy and unexpected apprehension of emotion. A lamp on a luggage rack “has a brass, trumpet-shaped shade that looks like it was designed in the Sixties. Sometimes there’s a bulb inside. But however much you toggle the little switch below, it never works… [O]nce in a blue moon, you do come across one that by a miracle still responds to the click of its old metal switch. The light they cast is negligible; all the same, when you find something working that shouldn’t be, it inspires a strange, wistful sort of tenderness.”

Like any means of transportation, trains are all about time, which Parks addresses in every form, from fond hobbyist’s and disgruntled commuter’s discussion of speed and schedules to scholarly comment on the cycles of history to contemplative regard for the unique and passing moment. This mixture is sometimes harmonious and sometimes jarring, but after a few chapters, any reader can’t help but sense the singularity of what Parks is doing, of the task and creative persona he has invented for himself. What other writer can one think of who married so very thoroughly into a different culture? Who settled not into a community of intellectuals or eccentric expatriates but in an out-of-the-way provincial suburb; made a systematic study of the language and literature; and sought tirelessly to discern the soul of the place in the ordinary details of a given period?

Having a lifelong chronicler is a peculiar treasure for Italy or for any country, though Italians themselves, jaded by coexistence with generations of arty foreigners, might be the last to admit this. “[Parks] has lived in Italy for over thirty years but resists the temptation of gratuitously criticizing it,” a recent Il Giornale article observed grudgingly.

Parks, to be sure, never criticizes gratuitously, nor does he praise. He records what is around him, and, in the process, notes comfort and discomfort, the lovely and the unlovely, justice and injustice. In doing so, he performs what could almost be described as a secular act of devotion. If one definition of love could be attempting to see—to acknowledge and accept—all aspects of the beloved, even the most banal, then Parks, raising his family, teaching his courses, buying his train tickets, has been, in his modest, haunting books, perhaps the most faithful foreign inamorato Italy has ever had.

Andrea Lee is a writer who lives in Turin, Italy, and Nosy Be, Madagascar.

Photograph by Ferdinando Scianna/Magnum.