Here and There Read Free Page B

here. It’s a typical Sicilian village, buttoned down and shuttered. It curls in on itself like a stone snake with an itch. There’s a good church, which is locked, with an interesting Norman mural, a crypt of dried mummies with bay leaves and rags in their stomachs, and a view that stretches across the centuries to the sea.
    â€˜Wait for me ’round the corner,’ said the Sicilian I was working with. ‘There’s a bar, you may know it. They made that film there.’ And indeed I did know it. This is the bar from The Godfather , where Michael meets the girl that he will briefly marry. It’s one of the great scenes, one of the great locations, in all of the short history of movies. Coppola used it to stand in for Corleone, a real place with long mafia associations but which has become too modern.
    Film tourism has now become big business, and I sat in the park opposite, where Michael had his wedding reception, and wondered why there was not a single intimation of what this place had once briefly been. My friend found me. ‘Do you recognise it?’ he asked.
    â€˜Yes, it’s exactly the way it is in the film, isn’t it?’
    â€˜Oh, I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I haven’t seen it.’
    â€˜You haven’t seen The Godfather ? Everyone’s seen The Godfather .’
    â€˜Not in Sicily,’ he said. ‘Why would we?’

Battle of the bulge
    Budgie-smugglers, apple- catchers … call them what you will, there’s no doubting there are strong cultural ties that bind us to our more extreme swimwear choices.
    I spent my first holiday in Spain for years. Andalusia. I’d forgotten what a vast business holidays are here. What Seattle is to computers, Bangladesh is to T-shirts, and Guangzhou is to small plastic toy cars with cartoon drivers, so Spain is to getting your bits burnt. Spain invented tourism. Obviously people had to go places before Spain came up with sea, sun, sex and sangria, but tourists tended to do what it said on the package: they toured. They went to look at things. Tourism was cities and ruins and self-improvement, not snoggery.
    It was the Spanish who had the uncharacteristically blue-sky idea of taking the interest out of travel, of removing the place from the destination. At the moment when aeroplanes got to their destinations more often than they disappeared into oceans, and working people thought it was safe enough and cheap enough to go away for a couple of weeks abroad instead of staying in Torquay or Bournemouth, the Spanish realised that the one thing that had been putting most Europeans off being tourists was the touring bit, the self-improvement, the churches and the ruins and the guide with the raised umbrella saying, ‘This way please – we have half an hour to do six centuries of frescoes, so no talking.’ The Spanish brilliantly discerned that what really attracted people was each other. The dons heard a mysterious disembodied voice saying, ‘Build it and they will come.’ (He probably said it in Spanish.)
    So they built Malága, and come they did, in their hundreds of thousands. They came because of the sun, and the bit of water, and the cheap wine and the paella, but mostly just for the sun. And the Spanish also realised that if the tourists wanted to go and see something exciting or edifying, then they’d just look at each other. And it turned out that most people would far rather look at each other than some old statue without arms. And to those who pointed out that they could have stayed home and looked at each other on the bus, the answer was plain: not in this colour, and certainly not wearing that. Where else could you see that particular swatch of human colouring range from deep-flayed puce to wizened-sideboard teak, and wearing such spectacular attention-seeking clobber?
    It is no accident that both the British and the Germans so often find themselves rubbing peeling shoulders