‘There you are!’ he cried. He sat down. He resumed his conversation. He began to tell me what the capotreno had said. The train would be leaving, but only when they found a co-driver. They were having trouble finding a co-driver. Because of the strike. As for Mestre, heaven only knows. His last train for some mountain destination departed at 8.15. ‘Who knows where I’ll be sleeping tonight?’ He seemed quite pleased with this melodramatic reflection. Then, glancing up at the luggage rack, he asked, ‘Where’s my suitcase?’
I shook my head. ‘You left it in the other carriage.’
‘What other carriage?’
The man hadn’t realised that he was now four carriages nearer to the locomotive.
‘Oh.’ He squinted at me. ‘I knew something was odd,’ he said. ‘But why on earth did you move?’
‘I want to be alone,’ I told him.
Alarmed, he jumped up and hurried back down the train to reclaim his suitcase. For a moment it crossed my mind he might be a ghost; he haunted this train, even when it was parked for days out in empty sidings. That would explain why he was so desperate for company. Taking no chances, I moved again, this time into first class. They can’t fine you for being in first class until the train actually starts moving. I felt sure this was a second-class ghost.
IT’S 6.50. THE LANDSCAPE slips away outside smeared windows. To the left is the pianura padana, a ribbon of low factories beside the line and beyond them long stretches of vines, orchards, maize. It’s flat and dull, foggy in winter, steamy in summer. The replacement of the old wooden vine supports with a harsh geometry of identical grey cement posts is depressing, likewise the huge expanses of protective black netting now stretched over the cherry orchards. No more the white spring blossoms. This countryside has a dogged, industrial, grid-like look, as if nature had been carefully parcelled out in discrete units to make it easier to count the cash. We’re travelling across one of the wealthiest areas in Western Europe.
But to the right of the line, the north, the land rises through the terraced hills of the Valpolicella to the mountains of Trentino. Here the vineyards have a more traditional aspect, and on a clear day white peaks are visible along the whole alpine arc. You can even make out the wolfish pine woods, far away, the grey rock faces and dark, resiny valleys. It’s good to glance up from a book and see the mountains, to imagine you can smell them. They afford an illusion of drama and, for someone who grew up in London, the assurance that I now live far from home. Then at Peschiera the train begins to fill.
Peschiera and Desenzano, the first two stops, lie on the southern shore of Lake Garda. Peschiera is where you get off for Gardaland, the Italian version of Disneyland. The pretty provincial station with its dark maroon stucco and unkempt flower beds is marred by a series of colourful wooden facades mimicking a street in the American West inhabited by cartoon characters. Gardaland, Bus navetta gratuito! says Yogi Bear. Free shuttle bus. During the summer holidays, the train will be packed with adolescents who come here to spend their parents’ money. This morning a police car has parked on the platform, as if Paperone and Topolino, or rather Mickey Mouse and Scrooge McDuck, had really been shooting it out.
The train rattles along a low ridge now and you can look down across old terracotta housetops and the concrete sprawl of hotels, pizzerias and gelaterie to the big lake, brightly grey in the morning light, stretching north as far as the eye can see, with terraced hills first, then darker mountains rising and closing in on either side, turning the water black. A fishing boat trails a long wake but seems to be fixed there. The surface is very still and solid-looking. A couple of backpackers clamber into the carriage, arguing in German. The Inter-regionali have rather cunning swing doors between carriages: you can never work out whether you’re supposed to push or pull, or on which side of the double door to do it. The backpackers have a tussle and almost fall over each other coming into the carriage.
To the left of the train are the low hills of Custoza, rounded morainic mounds of silt and rubble brought down by the glaciers when the lake was formed. Here in 1866 Victor Emmanuel II led his troops against the Austro-Hungarians, still masters of the Veneto despite the unification of the rest of Italy. Austria had offered to hand over the territory in return for Italian neutrality in its war with Germany, but Victor Emmanuel felt that the honour of his ancient family and new nation demanded that he win the territory by force of arms. His army of 120,000 was defeated by 80,000 Austrians. Fourteen thousand men died. Their skulls are on display in an ossuary. You can see where the bullets passed through. Most of them were young enough to have excellent teeth.
A significant part of that victorious Austrian army of 1866 was made up of local Italians who were not greatly inspired by the idea of national unity, and even today on
