But the great day was approaching. The first high-speed train was to coincide, more or less, with the opening of the newly renovated station, including a hundred shops, a new ticket hall, specially rebuilt ‘high speed’ platforms and, above all, an entirely new system for moving people through the station from metro, tram or bus to the platforms high above, and vice versa.
Until that fatal day la mobilità, as Italians call it, worked like this. First you went from the underground metro platform to street level using two escalators, or running up two flights of stairs. Coming out of the metro there were just a few weather-exposed yards before you were safely in the Sala delle Carozze – the carriage hall – a magnificent vaulted and porticoed space where taxis could pick up customers without their having to step out into the rain or sun. Then you passed through any one of a string of impressive, ironwork doors into the grand ticket hall of the station proper, whence you could take two central escalators heading up side by side to a mezzanine floor, then again two more escalators up to another vast hall of kiosks and cafes beyond which, at last, were the platforms themselves, all twenty-two of them, stretching away under an arched glass and iron canopy. Alternatively, you could choose the broad granite staircases at the left and right extremities of the ticket hall.
Why, you wonder, would anyone choose those stairs when we’re talking about climbing the equivalent of three floors in a regular house, having already climbed two to get out of the metro?
Here we have to mention an Italian trait that appears to be deeply ingrained in the national psyche: Italians do not walk on escalators and only rarely stand to one side to allow others to walk. In the main metropolises of the United Kingdom, Germany and the United States, people who don’t want to climb an escalator will stand to the right so that those in a hurry can scuttle by on their left. Rather than encumber the fast lane, they will place their bags on the step above or below them. This is extremely considerate and civilised of them.
Italians do not do this. Not because they are inconsiderate, but because it doesn’t occur to them. An Italian all alone on a broad, long modern escalator will stand to left or right as he or she chooses and invariably place his or her large suitcase on the same step, entirely blocking any swift passage up or down the escalator. Desperate, on one occasion, to get by the only two people on the up escalator at Stazione Centrale – the departure of my train already long announced – I was told by an only slightly irritated voice that if I wanted to rush madly around I really should have used the stairs, shouldn’t I, which are so much wider. They were a mild, middle-aged couple with Tuscan accents. They did not budge. When I pointed out that since the escalator had the advantage of moving upwards while the stairs notoriously stayed put, to rush up the escalator was faster than to rush up the stairs, the man observed that the escalator was set in motion precisely to save passengers the effort of climbing from one level to another. It was as if, as far as he was concerned, once one stepped onto an escalator the body naturally, instinctively reacted by assuming a position of rest and any other behaviour was perverse.
So from the time I started using the station I learned to ignore the slowly rising statues on the escalators and would dash to left or right and race up one of the grand granite stairways – forty-eight steps – with their polished marble balustrades and brass banisters beneath Fascist friezes celebrating an accelerated future as imagined in the 1920s – steamers, planes and trains, but not escalators.
For many years I taught an evening class that finished at 8.30, leaving me just thirty-five minutes, twenty-five of them on the metro, to make the last Intercity to Verona, at 9.05. After a while I realised I was measuring my ageing in terms of the energy with which I tackled those stairs. At thirty-five I could do the steps two at a time from the metro platform to the ticket hall and again from the ticket hall to the platforms – a total of five floors, I’d say – arriving at my train bathed in sweat but barely panting. At forty I was panting hard but still forcing myself. At forty-five I was obliged to take the top section just one stair at a time and still feared my legs might buckle under me or my heart burst. I would collapse into my seat with pulse thumping and a taste of blood in my throat. At fifty I had long given up those evening classes but nevertheless stepped briskly up the stairs, noticing that even when you take them one at a time you arrive earlier than the escalator zombies.
Then one ordinary evening late in 2008, returning from Milan to Verona, I found myself in a labyrinth. The monolith had been counting us down to the departure of that first high-speed train – we all knew exactly when that was going to happen – but the new station was unveiled quite casually. One day the covers were all in place; the next they came down. As I was passing through the ticket barrier from the metro, still one floor underground, a tunnel beckoned to my left where none had been before. Stazione Ferroviaria, the sign announced. Instead of climbing the stairs to street level one could now walk straight through to the station. Who would decline such an invitation? However, at the other end of the tunnel, I couldn’t find the escalator that ought to shoot me up to the rail platforms where I and everybody else needed to be. Instead there were shops
