It all sounds dreadfully familiar.
In the 1880s the Italian parliament, irritated with the poor showing of the private companies that held concessions to run the railways, actually debated the possibility of making the late arrival of a train a criminal offence. It is hard not to sympathise, though one might as well legislate against the rain. In Luigi Bertelli’s 1907 children’s novel Il giornalino di Gian Burrasca, translated as Diary of a Bad Boy, the nine-year-old Gian Burrasca, running away from home on a train, remarks, ‘Dad was really right when he bad-mouthed the rail service!’
But these were also years of heroic achievement, tunnels through the Apennines, tunnels under the Alps, feats of engineering beyond anything that had been done in England or Germany. Indeed, it was this explosion of activity in building the railways that led to the development of the engineer as a figure distinct from the architect, but equally respected in Italian culture, to the point that Ingegnere, Engineer, is a form of address in Italian equal to Doctor or Professor. And it was through constructing a network of railways across some of Europe’s most arduous terrain that the newly formed Italian nation won a reputation for ingenuity and adventurous construction projects. In the 1860s three Italian engineers invented a blast-hole drilling machine that used waterpower to compress air that then turned the drill bit; previous drills had been steam-driven, which meant that when digging tunnels vertical shafts had to be sunk to the tunnel face to remove the coal smoke. It was this Italian invention that made it possible to dig the Moncenisio tunnel under Fréjus in the western Alps in 1871. More than eight miles long and taking forty minutes for a train to cross, the tunnel reduced north–south travel times across the Alps by twelve hours and allowed British companies trading with India to get their goods from London to the port of Brindisi in just forty-seven hours. Italy thus began to attract trade to its ports that had hitherto gone through southern France. But 177 workers died building the Moncenisio. And more than 600 died of lung diseases after working on the nine-mile-long San Gottardo tunnel, completed in 1882. The longest Alpine tunnel was the Sempione; at twelve miles and five hundred yards it would be the longest tunnel in the world until 1979, when the Japanese went a mile longer. So whatever one says about punctuality and ticketing bureaucracy, you always have to take your hat off to the courage and expertise that built these railways. When a man is introduced to you with the title Ingegnere – Buon giorno, Ingegnere Rossi; piacere, Ingegnere Bianchi – you have to show a little respect.
Alas, all this hard and brilliant work rarely paid monetary dividends and certainly not in the short term. Railways really are the ultimate test of whether a capitalist model can ever be adequate in the sphere of public transport. If we want railways, we have to pay for them, and if we ask those who are travelling on the trains to pay the full price of the financing in the first few years of their use, then no one will travel on them and we will never have trains at all. This is an investment amortised over decades; centuries, even. The newly constituted Kingdom of Italy wanted railways and wanted the prestige that railways brought at a time when rapid, punctual train travel was the most visible indicator of collective wealth, progress and modernity. But they didn’t want to pay for them. They didn’t have the money to pay for them. This will be a familiar set of circumstances in many countries; one thinks of Britain when the Channel Tunnel was dug. The companies to which the Italian government gave the franchises to build and run the various lines, companies often owned by ministers’ friends and relatives, found they couldn’t after all make the handsome return on investment that the English had made; they had imagined they were doing something furbo and would clean up and instead they had done the country a great service and were looking at serious losses. But if they weren’t to get rich, they could hardly be allowed to fail either, for trains had become part of the social and economic landscape and to lose them would mean dreaming up a quite different vision of the future. As a result, all kinds of clever accounting had to be invented for the government to prop them up. It was to be, and still is, an absolute staple of the Italian railways, whether public or private, that in some way or other, acknowledged or unacknowledged, they were/are being paid for, or hugely subsidised, by the state, a state that was/is itself greatly in debt. As early as 1869 Mark Twain was puzzled by the phenomenon:
There are a good many things about this Italy which I do not understand – and more especially I can not understand how a bankrupt Government can have such palatial railroad depots. … As for the railways – we have none like them. The cars slide as smoothly along as if they were on runners … These things win me more than Italy’s hundred galleries of priceless art treasures, because I can understand the one and am not competent to appreciate the other … But … this country is bankrupt. There is no real foundation for these great works. The prosperity they would seem to indicate is a pretence. There is no money in the treasury, and so they enfeeble her instead of strengthening.
By the end of the nineteenth century Italy was indeed in deep trouble, facing hunger marches and large-scale protests, at least in part because of the careless public spending that had
