What is Tim Parks's Italian Neighbours about?

Tim Parks was born in Manchester in 1954 and has lived in Italy since 1981. Besides his own novels, one of which, Europa, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1997, he has translated Italian writers including Alberto Moravia, Italo Calvino and Cesare Pavese, and taught for years at IULM University in Milan, according to Wikipedia's page on him. Italian Neighbours: An Englishman in Verona was published by Heinemann in London in 1992, as the British Library catalogue records.

What it is about

Parks settles in a small town near Verona, and the book follows what happens as an English newcomer turns, slowly, into a local. Its subject is not Italy's monuments or landscapes but its people, and the unwritten codes that govern how they behave.

Penguin's description puts it as an Englishman discovering the real Italy, captivating and exasperating in turn, and examining its customs with wit and affection. Reviews quoted there note how Parks gradually comes to accept local attitudes that first puzzled him. That slow shift is the book's real story.

What makes it different from sunnier expat memoirs

There is a whole shelf of books about foreigners buying a ruin in the Italian countryside and falling in love with the light. Some are lovely; see our page on Under the Tuscan Sun for one of the most famous. Italian Neighbours is a different animal:

• The setting is ordinary. A small town in the Veneto, not a hilltop village chosen for its view.
• The author is staying. Parks is not on a sabbatical. He is learning to live, work and argue in Italian.
• The tone is sceptical. He is amused, sometimes baffled, occasionally cross, and quite willing to make himself the joke.
• The focus is people, not olive groves.

If you have ever moved to a new country, or even a new town, the experience of decoding unspoken rules will feel very familiar. Our page on feeling at home quickly in a new city is the practical companion.

How it reads now

The book describes Italy in the 1980s, and plenty has changed since. But its real subject, what it is like to be an outsider slowly becoming an insider, does not date. The pleasure is in the observation: small scenes, overheard conversations and the gradual sense of a place revealing itself.

How to read it

Take it slowly, a chapter at a time, ideally with a coffee at a bar counter where you can watch the same small dramas play out. Notice how often the joke is on the narrator rather than the Italians: that is what keeps the book generous. And if you are learning Italian, keep a note of the everyday phrases and habits Parks stumbles over. They are the ones no textbook teaches, and the ones you will meet first in any real neighbourhood.

Where to go next

Parks followed it with An Italian Education (1996), another book of Italian life, and later wrote a book about following Verona's local football club through a season. For an older and grander attempt to explain the Italian character, read Luigi Barzini's The Italians alongside it: Barzini writes from the inside out, Parks from the outside in.