Today the young people who use Porta Vescovo station to go to school in Verona or to university in Padua wouldn’t even know what an interurbano automatico or an operator-assisted call was. They have no idea why the circle of holes is interrupted at the bottom right. They have their mobiles in their pockets, the entire world at their fingertips. But the old yellow sign, the black phone, the dial, reminds us that the yearning for easy communication has always been there, that our grandparents and great-grandparents were already far, far ahead of their grandparents. If ‘ahead’ is the right word for this growing separation between where we are and who we’re talking to.
PORTA VESCOVO, I RECENTLY discovered, was actually Verona’s first railway station, inaugurated in 1847. At that time the country was still divided, with half a dozen more or less independent Italian states involved in a complex power game with France and Austria over who would control the peninsula. Verona was very much part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, indeed the bastion of Austrian defences of its Italian possessions, which then stretched from Trieste in the east all the way to Milan in the west. Almost at once people saw both the military potential of railways and their cultural importance to the Risorgimento movement: rapid, inexpensive travel between the different parts of Italy would surely help to unite the country. The Piedmontese, who were trying to harness Risorgimento enthusiasms to their own expansionist ambitions, were particularly active in building railways, linking Turin to Genoa and seeking to connect with Lombardy. Understandably, the Austrians were not impressed. They refused to connect the lines in their territories to other parts of Italy and built the lines between Milan and Brescia, Vicenza and Venice, Verona and Trento mainly to facilitate troop movements inside their own possessions. Eventually these lines were all linked up right here at Verona Porta Vescovo in 1854, forming one single east–west railway line across the northern margin of the Po Valley beneath the foothills of the Alps. A small siding ran out of Porta Vescovo directly into what is still the large military barracks at Camp Marzo nearby. Soldiers could spill out of their fortress in Verona to be sent off by train to whichever border of the Austro-Hungarian Empire was under threat.
The railways certainly played their part in the Risorgimento wars. The Franco-Piedmontese victory over the Austrians at Magenta in 1859, one of the few important victories the Piedmontese achieved, came largely thanks to a recently completed rail bridge that allowed Piedmontese troops to cross the Ticino River, then the boundary with Austrian territories, rapidly and in force. A year later, Garibaldi crowned his triumphant conquest of the south by riding into Naples on a train. That same year the learned journal Politecnico remarked that Italian unity was to be completed and maintained by ‘armies and railways’.
THIS HIGH PROFILE FOR railways wasn’t always positive. The first major corruption scandal of the newly unified Italy involved the trains: it came out that ministers had awarded lucrative railway contracts to a company in which they themselves were major shareholders. In general the attempt in the 1860s and 70s to bring the country together very quickly by building more and more railways led to shoddy workmanship and many rail companies failing when it turned out that there was little demand for the lines they had so enthusiastically laid. In 1893 the cultural magazine Nuova Antologia observed,
the determining criteria in Italian railway construction from the unification of the Kingdom until the present day, have overwhelmingly been more political than technical and economic. Financial questions played only the smallest part. But while in the beginning those political criteria were grandiose and national, just and even necessary, later they were to become pettier and pettier, to the point that they were almost always more regional than rational.fn1
Much of the rail building was done in response to the mythical success of railways elsewhere, above all in England. The anxiety to compete with northern European rivals, a constant need to prove themselves equal if not superior to their neighbours, is still an important factor in Italian decision-making today. The emotions that fuelled local campanilismo had carried over onto the international scene, as if collective identity for the Italians could only be asserted through competition. Copying the English model, as they did, buying locomotives and machinery from England and coal from Germany, Italian companies forgot that in England the railways had been introduced into a booming industrial economy where demand for transport was intense and coal and steel readily available. In Italy, on the other hand, many railways were soon being seen as cathedrals in the desert. Fewer people or goods were moving around, and since salaries were low, fares too had to be kept low. Train use per person in Italy remained far below that in England, Germany or France right into the mid-twentieth century. One problem was the complex ticketing, with so many different companies each having their own byzantine rules. In Le ferrovie, Stefano Maggi quotes this letter written in 1869 by a member of parliament to the Minister for Public Works:
Last week, coming back from Florence to London, I found myself sitting with a number of English and American travellers, some of whom were returning from the Orient, via Brindisi. It’s not an exaggeration, Minister, to say that the trip was a constant series of complaints about Italian railways; these travellers were simply amazed that a smart, modern people like the Italians could put up with so many vexations … With regard to paper money, they told me an incredible story. A traveller wanting to buy a ticket costing 15.75 lire handed over 16 lire in National Bank notes. The people at the ticket office refused to accept them insisting that 1.75 lire should be in silver or coppers and the rest in banknotes. Since the traveller didn’t
