A few days later, on the platform at Firenze Santa Maria Novella, I bought a flask of Chianti with two German boys, the kind of wine they sell in bellied bottles with straw aprons, and after no more than a couple of swigs passed out, to wake up in my vomit three hours later in the corridor of an evening Espresso to Rome. Those were the days, fortunately long over, when cheap wine might be cut with almost anything. I spent that night in a sleeping bag on a patch of grass outside Roma Termini with thirty or forty other travellers, and while I slept, my shoulder bag, which was looped around my neck, was razored away; when I woke I had lost my shoes, guidebook and passport, but not my wallet, which was in my underpants. That morning my bare feet burned on the scorching tar as I began the first of many bureaucratic odysseys in this country that years later would become my home. Of the language I knew not a word. These were rites of passage; I had been delivered into my Italian future by train.
I have now lived in Italy for thirty-two years. There are plateaus, then sudden deepenings; all at once a corner is turned and you understand the country and your experience of it in a new way. You could think of it as a jigsaw puzzle in four dimensions; the ordinary three, plus time: you will never fill in all the pieces, if only because the days keep rolling by, yet the picture does seem more complete and above all denser and more convincing with every year. You’re never quite a native, but you’re no longer a stranger. So just as my knowledge of Italian literature has slowly extended from the novels of Natalia Ginzburg and Alberto Moravia, which I read to learn the language, underlining every word, back through the masterpieces of Svevo and Verga, Manzoni and Leopardi, then further and further into the past until I was finally ready for Dante and Boccaccio, likewise my knowledge of le ferrovie italiane has extended and deepened and intensified. It’s not a question any more of liking or hating them; these ironways are family.
At first train travel was just a chore. In 1992 I gave up language teaching at the University of Verona for a career track job at a university in Milan. With small children we didn’t want to move to the big city, so I was condemned to commuting two or three times a week. I had no idea then that Italian railways were hitting an all-time low and even less knowledge of the reasons why that was so. I just suffered and of course laughed, since laughter is preferable to tears, and more sustainable. But often I enjoyed too: for to move on rails through a beautiful landscape is always a pleasure, and strangely conducive to reading, which is a major part of my life. Plus there was this: the deeper you get into a country, the more every new piece of information, every event and discovery, arrives as a fascinating confirmation, or challenge: how can I reconcile this bizarre thing that has happened with what I already know about the place? What might have seemed trivial or merely irritating the first year you were here now enriches and shifts the picture.
I began to take notes. I began to think that if someone wanted to understand Italy they might start by understanding how the train ticketing system works, or by listening to the platform announcements at Venezia Santa Lucia and Roma Termini, the strange emphasis given to certain names, the completely impractical order in which information is presented. In 2005 the magazine Granta asked me to write a travel piece and, cheating a little, because this was not strictly travel writing, I had a chance to use my jottings. Out of character, I wrote four times as much as they wanted, 120 pages, far too much for a magazine piece, not really enough for a book; but then I hadn’t been thinking of a book; I was just having fun, so much more fun than I’d expected, writing about the railways, the Italian way of running their railways. Granta published a fragment.
Seven years later, Italian trains have changed enormously, Italy has changed, as have Europe and the world. Not to mention the author. Last year I came back to the book that wasn’t quite a book. Were these pages simply out of date? Or could the difference between the way things were then and the way they are now be used to show something that has always fascinated me: how national character manifests itself most clearly when the things you thought couldn’t change finally do. If you look at the way high-speed trains are being introduced into Italy while the regional services languish, if you look at the way the mobile phone is used in the business-class compartments of a Milano–Roma Frecciarossa, if you look at how ticketing has been computerised and watch the way the frightening old on-board inspectors deal with it, if you travel the south coast of Calabria and Puglia and see how European Community money has been spent or misspent on the deserted railways, again and again, for good or ill, there it is, undeniably,
