‘Well, signorina, you’ll have to move,’ he says. He likes calling her signorina. The girl half stands and the inspector moves on down the now pleasantly free carriage. All those remaining are handing him regular first-class tickets with affable smiles. The girl continues to fuss with her bags, pulling things out and putting them back in and arranging this and that until quite suddenly she sits down again, slumps low in the seat so her blonde head is beneath the top of the backrest, and closes her eyes.
‘He’s gone,’ I tell her after another minute. She opens one eye, smiles, opens the other, laughs, pushes a hand through her lovely hair, then fusses in her bag and brings out an economics textbook. She has to study.
I ask, ‘What will you do when he comes back?’
She frowns. ‘It’ll take him a while to get down the train. It’s very crowded.’
‘He’ll have his assistant working up from the other end.’
‘We’ll see,’ she says.
‘Theoretically he could get nasty.’
‘Theoretically,’ she agrees. ‘But I don’t think so.’
I realise that I’m dealing with someone more integrated in this society than I can ever hope to be.
‘Why not?’
‘They’re not serious about first class, are they?’
I raise an eyebrow.
‘When you travel on a bus without a ticket, what happens? If an inspector gets on, he blocks the doors of the bus and anyone freeloading is fined. That’s serious. They could easily get the two inspectors to arrive at the opposite doors of first class and fine everyone with a second-class ticket.’
‘They could.’ I had never thought of this.
‘If I went into first class in a Eurostar, they’d fine me at once.’
‘But not here.’
‘They’re not serious.’
‘But why not?’
She frowns. Clearly she is a serious student.
‘I think they would rather all these people paying for first class moved to the faster trains. The poveretti here and the benestanti there.’
Poor and rich.
I ask, ‘So why offer first class at all?’
‘They have the carriages. Someone is always stupid enough to pay, even when they don’t get a service.’
‘Grazie.’
‘Prego,’ she says with a laugh.
IF THE FERROVIE DELLO stato are not serious about class distinctions on the Regionali, when you arrive at Milano Centrale it becomes all too obvious what they do care about. Here a revolution is under way. Inside the station a major refurbishment has just been unveiled; immediately outside, a dramatic year-long countdown is nearing its end. And in every aspect of these changes you can savour what was implicit in that smart girl’s observations: the determined division of the railways into the haves and the have-nots, those who travel on Regionali and those who travel on Eurostar, or something even better.
I have described the grandeur of the place, a building with almost twice the cubic volume of the great Gothic Duomo in the centre of the city, but I didn’t get over the deep melancholy of its neglect before 2008. In particular, I remember the black nets strung like funeral drapes from end to end of the huge entrance hall (the so-called Sala delle Carozze) about thirty feet above ground, presumably to prevent pigeons from flying into the vaulted spaces above. Sagging as they gathered filth, these nets robbed the passengers of the exhilarating elevation the original architects had planned, that cathedral feeling that invites you to see a spiritual side to every journey. In fact, everything about the station at that time, its cluttered newspaper kiosks and dilapidated prefab sandwich bars, exuded an atmosphere of defeatism. Routine maintenance is never a strong suit for the Italians. They are good at putting on the initial splash, building the building, laying out the roads, arranging the flower beds; they love opening nights and ribbon cutting. But it’s hard to keep the great spectacle fresh and gleaming; its very splendour becomes a burden hardly sustainable on a day-to-day basis, like a romance too wonderful to survive the meaner intercourse of marriage. With a collective shrug, what was a wonderful show is allowed to fall apart. There’s even a sort of grim satisfaction in its debasement. It was too much work. It wasn’t that important. You let grass grow, dust gather, cataracts fall over the eyes. Scurrying back and forth from metro below to train platform above, no one wants to remember the vision when the founding stone was laid, no one wants to be reminded of the intoxicating rhetoric of the unveiling.
Until the day comes when something really has to be done, or when someone has finally managed to come up with the €120 million it’s going to cost. In 2006 they began the long-overdue renovation. The scaffolding went up, large areas of the station disappeared under drapes. Suddenly my favourite sandwich stand and all the staff I’d got to know over so many years were gone. I do hope those people weren’t just fired. For two years we were channelled this way and that between boarded walls and splattered hangings. Some 350,000 people pass through this station every day. It’s a miracle they kept it up and running while completely redesigning the very core of the place, and above all, as we shall see, the movement through it.
In the meantime, the big open piazza outside the station, Piazza Duca d’Aosta, was also being torn up. This is one of those classic urban spaces set aside for anarchy, demonstrations, drunks, football fans, travellers without the price of a hotel, peddlers, pickpockets, prostitutes and drug dealers; a muddle of ill-kept grass, cigarette butts and powerfully unpleasant smells in damp corners. At a push, in daylight and decent weather, it could be OK for a quiet smoke or a sandwich sitting on a low wall, gazing up at the imposing facade of the station with its curious central inscription in letters a yard high: NELL’ANNO MCMXXXI DELL’ERA CRISTIANA (IN THE YEAR 1931 OF THE CHRISTIAN ERA), a sly allusion to the fact that back then
