Tobias Jones – The Po
It’s curious that Italy’s longest river should have such a short name, especially in a country enamoured of long words. But then, length only says so much. Tobias Jones’ The Po: An Elegy for Italy’s Longest River is not a particularly long book, but, like its subject, it is capacious, voluminous, and sluggish. Jones starts his journey – which is literal as well as literary – in the Po delta, thence heading upstream to the source, a decision born of his professed “reluctance to go with the flow”. But he is walking, cycling, occasionally canoeing; the one who feels like they are swimming against the current is the reader.
By his own admission, Jones spends much of the trek battling with ennui in a famously, oppressively flat floodplain. “I find myself yearning for steepness”, he writes. “I’ve been tramping for months now and I’m still only about 25 metres above sea level. The river is so wide it’s unrelatable. It’s as if I’m trying to bond with a slug.” But if he can’t ‘bond’ with it, what chance have we? As someone who has lived in the fertile but deadeningly featureless Po Valley, I sympathise with the struggle while querying the premise of the book, which obliges Jones to an exhaustive search for points of interest.
Some of them are genuinely interesting, and important. Far from cutting a groove through Padania (the etymologically-related, politically-skewed term for northern Italy), we learn that much of the Po runs high above its surroundings, corralled by a massive system of embankments which mean that “you don’t walk down to the river, but up to it”. The only proper response is a spasm of dread, historically justified by the flood of 1951: on 14th November the river started haemorrhaging at the rate of three Olympic swimming pools per second, and not until 20th December were the breaches plugged. Since then the locals have been amply revenged, with the run-off from spray-soaked arable giving us a Po ever more steroidal and choked in algae. Nobody seems to care very much. “Now the river…has no purpose for the majority of people here – it’s just an obstacle to be overcome.”
It’s that fatalist note that makes Jones’ “elegy” more like a dirge, a note that in the end subdues us to apathy. The book never really manages to bridge the gap between river and reader; we are always conscious of seeing it – picturing it, rather – at one remove. This is largely down to Jones’ encumbrant voice, which is constantly reminding us that we are in a different country and speak a different language. The old work songs of the mondine, the downtrodden rice-pickers whose tradition stretched well into the twentieth century, is imagined as “a sort of Lombardia-blues”, while “Lombardy-blues” would have had more swing, more shuffle. A fascinating observation from Fellini, who filmed in the Padanian marshes, is translated with the same tic:
We had been in Sicilia and Napoli, amidst a spectacular, Spanish sort of poverty…in the Po delta, however, the poverty had something wild, something silent. When we came across people, they displayed an Eskimo strangeness. It was as if we were on the polar ice-caps. And yet they were Italians.
Clearly, Jones’ refusal to Anglicize “Sicilia” and “Napoli” is not the main point here, but it is symptomatic of a book larded with italics, which are loudly glossed. It suffers from an Italianer-than-thou register, with Jones seemingly conversant in the many dialects that he hears along the way, and a wearying cynicism, as shown by his retelling of a riverlands folk tale: “Inevitably, they say that on moonlit nights you can still see, in the water, the white lace of her wedding veil.” Jones could hardly have written a book like The Dark Heart of Italy (2003) without a certain cynicism, but he might have dispensed with it, with that sneering “inevitably”, while paraphrasing a harmless old yarn.
Then again, months by the Po would leave anybody cynical. So many things have disappeared, be it the once-thriving sturgeon, the floating mills occasioned by the unpredictable watermark, or the river itself, branches of which now dry up completely in the summer. Jones had hoped that his journey “might be a little like being lowered into the River Jordan, the baptismal waters returning me to my place in creation. But the Po is so dirty and murky it’s as if it needs a cleansing more than we do.” With litanies of “the oily film, the plastic bags, the sewage…chlorides, phenols, phosphates, heavy metals and microplastics”, The Po: An Elegy for Italy’s Longest River is a grim diagnosis, which it should be. But it inspires less indignation than resignation.
The Po: An Elegy for Italy’s Longest River is published by Bloomsbury and is available here.
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