Tim Parks

first met the man whom the poet and Nobel Laureate Joseph Brodsky calls "the best English author living today" in the mid-1990s, thanks to two nonfiction books he wrote on Italian life "Italian Neighbors" and "An Italian Education." Still landmarks of delightful but unromantic writing about the "real Italy," these have been since joined by 15 novels, a book-length account of the ups and downs of the AC Verona football team ("A Season With Verona"), a history of the Medici family ("Medici Money"), a book on Italian translation of modernist English writing, "narrative essays" ("Adultery & Other Diversions"), two books of literary essays, and numerous articles published in the London Review of Books and other periodicals.

His 1997 novel "Europa" — a noir look at the European Parliament — was short-listed for the Booker Prize. The prolific Parks has also found time to translate Italian novelists Alberto Moravia, Roberto Calasso and Italo Calvino while living and working in a country that continues to fascinate him. ("If you really try to explain Italy to anyone, they'd probably just give up; it's so bewildering.")

The Manchester-born, Cambridge-educated Parks, an avid whitewater kayaker, is married to an Italian (they moved here in 1981). The couple have three children and Parks teaches literary translation at the Università IULM, a Milan-based language and communications university founded in 1998. He regularly attends literary conferences, will curate an exhibit on the Medici Family in 2010 and has a new Penguin translation of Machiavelli's "The Prince" due for summer release.

We met for a lunch at a bar near the IULM, and soon began chatting about journalism and Italy. His favorite Italian word means "twist it up," but he shoots straight.

You're no fan of foreign journalists.

Correspondents here are such a joke. Newspapers send people who can't speak a word of Italian and get someone to translate the article in La Repubblica… Readers outside Italy don't want complications. They only want the stereotypes that play into their ongoing story about Italy, which only rarely superimposes the reality here. And if ever there were a country that you can't understand without putting the word complication in the first sentence….

Mussolini addressing a southern crowd, 1923.

If you really try to explain Italy to anyone, they'd probably just give up; it's so bewildering.

Probably it's the same in many countries. But in Italy it's about the confusion between what's hidden and what's not. It's not totally corrupt — as it is in some African countries — and it's certainly not totally up front.

You are a fan of Trentino, which you mention in several books.

It's not the Trentino, it's the Alto Adige! I've spent many years on holiday in the South Tyrol. I kayak in the South Tyrol. But then when I wrote "Cleaver" (2006), it was just the right place to put him [protagonist Cleaver], because a visitor hasn’t got a chance, no matter what language he speaks. The region belies all that stuff about Europe and unification.

The whole story of the Trentino and Alto Adige is very tormented. After World War I, when the South Tyrol region was given to Italy [from Austria], the Italians agreed they would give it some autonomy. Instead, they added on Trentino, creating a region where [German speakers are] in the minority. That way an ethnic Italian majority would always control it. So it was all a steal, a classic piece of prevarication. Only in 1991 did the South Tyrol finally get a deal.

It's an absolute anomaly that it belongs to Italy. Try telling Italians that. It's amazing when someone tells me that Ireland, if it wants to be alone, should just go for it. If you say the same thing about [the Alto Adige], people get very, you know…

What do you think about Italian political turmoil these days?

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