You cross the rails to platform four. There are about ten people spread along a platform of a couple of hundred yards. The first-class carriages are towards but not actually at the front. Other passengers on the platform can see you’re standing in the first-class area. You’re the only one. It’s simultaneously embarrassing and gratifying. The bell begins to ring out with its urgent, insistent tone. The train hoves into view from the Venice direction. The big, filthy blue locomotive squeals and labours along the rails. The old rolling stock is smothered with graffiti. The windows show that the carriages are packed. People are standing, many of them masked in the silliest outfits. How smart of you, you think, to have bought a first-class ticket!
As the train finally grinds to a halt, you move to the nearest door, pleased to be an insider who knows exactly where his carriage will be. The door opens and a group of Australians begins to climb down. ‘Wrong station, mate, you want the next,’ you tell a strapping boy in a cavalier cloak. ‘This is just a provincial watering hole.’ They laugh and climb back up. So now you’ve done a good deed on top of all your other smart decisions. You hurry after them, your stamped first-class ticket all legal and correct in your pocket and …
First class is full. It’s packed. It’s asphyxiating. There’s not a seat to be had. People are standing all down the aisle. The heat is on maximum and the air is unbreathable. Dismayed, there’s nothing you can do but push your way to the middle of the carriage and laugh at yourself for having thrown away the cash.
I stand and try to read. There are people who, however packed a train is, always believe that it is worth moving along from one carriage to the next, even if other people are moving in the other direction in the same vain hope. I try to make myself very slim as backpacks push behind me. The train does not empty at Verona Porta Nuova as I hoped it might. Nobody gets off at Peschiera fifteen minutes later. Rather, there are more getting on, families who’ve taken advantage of a bright cold day to go to Gardaland.
Then just before Desenzano there’s a sudden stirring. People are standing up. People are pushing down the carriage towards the door behind me. How odd, I think, that so many people would be getting off at the small lake station of Desenzano. There must be some event on, some carnival occasion.
No, it’s the ticket inspector. The man with the green cap has just appeared up the aisle.
Two minutes later, I’m sitting comfortably in a half-empty carriage. ‘Passengers are advised to check,’ runs one regular recorded announcement, ‘that the class indicated on their documento di viaggio corresponds to the class of seats they are actually occupying.’ The appearance of the inspector has inspired a good fifty people to take that advice and flee.
If ever smug self-righteousness were tangible, it is now. There is a grim satisfaction on the faces of those who remain, the faces of the good citizens who have actually paid for their first-class ticket. For myself, I’m relieved to be sitting and able to work, but not sure that I’m entirely happy with the spirit of this. The rest of the train will now be even more packed and asphyxiating. Those who fled included the aged and infirm. Now I’m feeling guilty for the luxury I have paid for. However, some minutes after the inspector has gone, people begin to drift back from second class. It’s a scandal, an elderly lady remarks complacently as she settles herself beside me, to leave these seats empty while people are standing.
This scenario was repeated on three of the five remaining occasions when I used my first-class tickets. On the other two, the ticket inspector never passed by and I stood the whole way.
On one trip I met someone who had an interesting take on the situation. Having bagged a seat at Verona Porta Nuova, I offered to help the girl opposite me put her big bag up on the rack, since it was occupying the space between us, preventing us from stretching our legs. She shook her head. ‘Hardly worth it,’ she says. She doesn’t have a first-class ticket, she explains, so will probably have to move on soon. ‘Just that there’s nowhere else to sit in the entire train.’ She says this as if she had checked every single carriage herself. In the meantime other people around us are standing, some of whom perhaps do have first-class tickets. But the girl is pleasant and I choose not to comment.
‘They should have more of these Interregionali,’ she goes on, not by way of justification; she’s merely remarking that the demand is there and should be satisfied. ‘The Intercity costs twice as much,’ she explains, as if someone with a trace of foreign accent could not know that.
‘The reason they don’t have more,’ I point out, ‘is that they wouldn’t make any money at all if everybody travelled to Milan for nine euros.’
‘That’s true,’ she says equably.
‘I suppose that’s why people pay a bit extra for first class,’ I observe, pointedly, I hope. ‘To sit.’
‘If they can afford first class,’ she says, ‘I can’t see why they don’t get the faster train.’
‘Maybe it doesn’t stop at their station. It doesn’t stop where I get on, for example.’
‘Right, it must be that,’ she agrees. Nothing I say seems to undermine her confidence in what she originally said, despite her acknowledgement that I have a point.
The inspector appears, but the girl doesn’t get up and hurry off with the others. Very calmly and naturally she shows the inspector her ticket.
‘This is a second-class ticket, signorina,’ he observes, ‘and you are in first class.’
The girl looks around with an air of vague surprise.
‘Is it?’
But she isn’t really trying to fool
