When you have chosen your destination, you are asked what date you plan to travel. Today, tomorrow, or some time in the future. A calendar appears. You can buy a ticket for months ahead. With that choice behind you, a timetable appears, a list of trains of all different kinds at different hours. You touch your train. First class or second? Do you want to reserve a seat? A window seat? A corridor? And what kind of ticket do you want, what kind of reductions are you eligible for? Hesitate too long and the screen will return to its default setting. I have seen first-timers on the brink of tears.
So just as for any bureaucratic adventure in Italy – registering a car purchase, getting a Christmas parcel through customs – there is always some private agency willing, at a price, to step in and remove the anxiety of a direct confrontation with a public service employee, so at the railway station young Slav boys and girls will offer to mediate between you and a ticket machine programmed by a public service employee.
A polite twelve-year-old with a strong accent offers to work the ticket screen for a confused signora. She is bejewelled and smart in a frilly, old-fashioned, southern way, with hair permed to a helmet and powdery wrinkles. He has a thin little nose, clear skin and shrewd, darting black eyes. ‘Grazie,’ she says, for he has already stepped in.
‘Where you go?’
‘Salerno.’
How quickly the boy’s fingers move over the screen with its rapidly dissolving numbers and colours!
‘Train in twenty minutes. You want return?’
His Italian is terrible, but he works the machine so fast it’s hard to keep up.
‘You want the first class? You pay cash?’
‘Si?’
Cash! Incredibly, the woman hands the boy a €50 note to feed into the machine. And he feeds it in! I had feared the worst. At the end of all this, he hopes there will be a tip for him, of course. Anyone who understands these machines deserves one. Or perhaps, since you can purchase these tickets with a credit card, he wouldn’t be unhappy if someone hurried off leaving an American Express in the slot; the mechanism doesn’t oblige you to reclaim the card before delivering the ticket.
The boy feeds in the €50 note, then gathers the change that clatters into the returned coins tray below. Politely, he hands it, all of it, to the signora. She leaves him €1. He smiles and makes a small bow. I feel humbled by such trust and generosity. Why am I so suspicious? Alas, with all their complications, their apparent covering of every base, the machines don’t offer Intercity supplementi separate from Intercity tickets, and so a man who has an annual season ticket for the Interregionale but wishes to make his return journey on an Intercity is condemned to the ticket windows. And if the queues are too long he may end up going home on a slow old Interregionale after all.
SINCE I USUALLY ARRIVE at the station shortly before seven in the evening and won’t be home till nine, I’m often tempted to grab a bite. What’s on offer at Milano Centrale? There’s the free shop, the self bar, the stand-up cafe (with one counter inside and one counter out), and the traditional, sit-down, table-service cafe. What the free in free shop refers to is anyone’s guess. Perhaps it has the same significance as the star in Eurostar. You enter through a tight, brightly chromed turnstile and at once face one of those Italian situations that are so character-forming. Arranged around a corner is a long counter selling a wide variety of freshly made sandwiches. A crowd forms along the whole counter, or rather mills around the apex of the corner like a busy eddy in a rough river. There is no question of a proper queue. Perhaps the FREE stands for free-for-all, you think. Behind the counter are two acned and bewildered youngsters, one replenishing the sandwiches, one serving the customers. He or she who shouts loudest is served first, regardless of when he or she arrived – unless, that is, the person serving takes a dislike to you. You have overdone it. You have offended him in some way. Then you could be stuck here for a while.
The proper approach is to assume the face of one who is harassed, about to miss a train, and yet absolutely understanding of the pressure the server is under. Above all, never waste time with questions about what’s in the sandwiches. The short, sharp, polite request, even over the heads of a dozen others, is always rewarded. I have become an expert.
‘Ciabatta con crudo!’ I shout. ‘Per favore!’
And I’m gone!
The SELF BAR is another interesting use of English. What it amounts to is a posh-looking vending machine – there’s one on every platform – about three yards long by six feet high, oval in shape, with food products on one side and drinks on the other. Presumably the designers were aware that the English expression is self-service, but of the two words they clearly felt the positive one was self. I have an aversion to buying food from machines. The only thing that seems to get eaten is my money. I pass by. I do not even examine what’s on offer. No doubt I’m old-fashioned.
Which leaves the two cafes. For any curious traveller, the large, table-service bar at the end of the upper concourse (on the far right as you emerge from the stairs) is a must for understanding the abyss in Italy between the private and public sectors, a psychological as much as an economic abyss.
I think I can say without fear of contradiction that in general there is no city in the world where the coffee experience is better arranged than in Milan. The barmen in the thousands of small cafes around the town are never temps, or students, or would-be actors going through hard times. They know how to make coffee.
