In Europe

room, without a bed, but with a sofa on which to rest. And when? In-between times, of course.’
    As individuals, Hitler and Mussolini were each other's polar opposites as well. The former was an unmarried artist, a vegetarian terrified of disease, the latter a family man with five children and any number of mistresses. The former displayed all the frustrations of the failed painter, at the age of thirty the latter was already the successful editor-in-chief of one of the biggest daily newspapers. In the eyes of the European elite, Hitler was always viewed as an erratic madman. Even before the First World War, Mussolini was seen as a promising politician. When Mussolini turned his back on socialism, Lenin sorely blamed his fellow party members in Italy for letting him go: in Moscow's view, he would have been the perfect leader for a great socialist revolution in Italy.
    Today, sixty years later, the myth lives on. Four boys with shaved heads are taking pictures of each other. One of them asks me in a whisper whether I would mind taking a group snapshot, to put on Il Duce's tomb. On the prie-dieu lies the big guest book with a thousand inscriptions of ‘Thank you, Il Duce!’ Touring cars full of senior citizens roll up into the car park many times a day. ‘Il Duce, you live on in our hearts!’
    Outside I talk to the woman selling souvenirs. ‘Today everyone herein the village is a communist,’ she sighs, standing amid her collection of Iron Crosses. ‘But in the old days they adored him.’
    A little boy stands in line to pay for three postcards: one showing a woman kissing the Fascist banner, a recruitment poster for the Italian SS legion and one on which Stalin and Uncle Sam join hands across the Atlantic: ‘
Le Complot Juif
’. The woman cries after me as I walk away: ‘That's just like the Italians! They never recognise a great leader!’

Chapter TWENTY-ONE
Lamanère
    THE NEXT EVENING I STAY AT MONEGLIA, A DESERTED TOURIST VILLAGE on the seaside not far from Genoa. These are the days of depression. The wind tugs at my van, the rain clatters on the roof and only Café Derna offers warmth and safety.
    The village is dominated by a highly unusual access road: a narrow strip of asphalt along the coast, consisting almost entirely of tunnels. All traffic, in both directions, must obey traffic lights that provide an opening to the outside world only three times an hour, down to the minute. The lights, therefore, determine the rhythm of village life as well: ‘Hurry up or you'll miss the green light at 3.45!’
    This strange road, they told me at the café, was all that was left of a railway line that had been built along the coast with great difficulty in the early years of the century. A huge job, but one which would serve for generations to come. The railway, in reality, was in use for scarcely twenty-five years. Then came yet another rail connection a little further along, electric, with two sets of tracks. Built, once again, for all eternity.
    Elsewhere I had seen the same thing: railway trestles, escarpments, built to last for all time, abandoned in the countryside. During the last half-century this continent has been criss-crossed and ploughed through with tunnels, bridges and concrete flyovers, an incredible amount of work. The Roman aqueducts did their work for centuries. Tomorrow, the twentieth-century tunnels and flyovers will already be antique. Never before has progress worn so thin so quickly.
    I drive on through the rain, along the coast, past Nice and the French Riviera. At Aix-en-Provence the mistral is chasing newspapers and plastic bags across the asphalt like little phantoms. Someone once told me thatold women sometimes faint from agitation when the mistral blows: now I can imagine it, vividly. Nothing stays put, everything whips and foments in the face of this noisy wind: branches, leaves, birds, thoughts, moods.
    In the days that follow there are the comforting, colourful hills of southern France, the odours of earth and sun. At Perpignan I turn right into the Pyrenees. I drive past sleepy village squares with old men and tall plane trees, after that along a narrow road, a fifteen kilometre climb, and arrive at last in the southernmost of all French villages.
    ‘Every valley,’ an economist wrote about the Pyrenees in 1837, ‘is a still little world that differs from the neighbouring world as Mercury does from Uranus. Every village is a clan, a sort of state with its own patriotism.’