Then this thing, usually described with recourse to French as a tapis roulant, but which I have also seen translated on the FS website as a ‘treadmill’ – this strange silver-and-glass thing took its freight of scores upon scores of passengers plus their clutter of luggage only as far as the Sala delle Carozze. That is, having gone through the tunnel and now up the tapis roulant, we were still outside the main station itself; in the past I could get here in about twenty seconds using the stairs.
Now I hurried through to the station where I needed a ticket. But the last ticket windows beside the stairs in the main hall had been closed. Again a tunnel opened where once there had been only solid walls; it bore the legend Biglietteria e Binari: Tickets and Tracks. Intensely fluorescent after the marble-softened daylight of the main hall, this unexpected burrowing was to the left of the main central escalators, which were now both coming down rather than going up. Weird! How were we supposed to get up to the platforms?
The walls of this new tunnel were formed by sparkling shop windows. There were about thirty yards of this, then a space of thousands of square feet opened out that none of us had ever seen before; it was as if we’d been admitted to some fantastic grotto deep inside a hill whose steep slopes in the past we had simply climbed straight up. Here, two more tapis roulants, again departing perpendicular to the direction you wanted to move in, headed upwards, while beyond them a line of perhaps twenty glass doors invited you into the ticket office at the very back of the grotto. So now, once you had bought your ticket, you had to backtrack through the glass doors to these tapis roulants, which took you up with interminable leisureliness, not directly to the tracks but to a whole mezzanine floor, another novelty, where you could stop and explore another line of shop windows or turn round and board yet a third tapis roulant, which doubled back on the second to drag you up, finally, bewildered, and above all late, to platform level.
In short, a building designed as a magnificent thoroughfare taking you straight down from train to street or directly up from street to train and offering you on the way and without going out of your way the simple services of food, newspapers and tickets, had been transformed into an underground maze of zigzagging conveyor belts moving perpendicular to your intended destination and hiding the most essential requirements deep in buried dead ends.
Why?
Elementary. To take you past the 108 shopfronts that now invite you in Stazione Centrale. So while fuming and fretting at the thought that your train might depart at any moment, you can contemplate designer sunglasses, ladies’ undergarments, bathing costumes, bestsellers, more ladies’ undergarments, the latest Mac, iPhone, iPod and PC, running shoes, sportswear, men’s suits, yet more ladies’ undergarments, and so on. Or alternatively, if weary of images of bright fabrics stretched over pert buttocks and breasts (and surely we belong to the first generation for whom it is possible to tire of such images), you can raise your eyes to where the renovators have indeed done a magnificent job of cleaning the elegant stone arches, sculptures and mosaics of the 1920s building; though here again, images of provocatively worn underwear hanging on huge placards from the ceiling break up the sober pomp that might otherwise have helped you resign yourself to missing your train.
Is it incompetence?
No. It is desperation.
Trenitalia has a massive overall debt of more than €6 billion. The government’s social policy, as expressed in their franchise, doesn’t allow them to raise fares to realistic levels and they have already laid off as many staff as is politically acceptable. Something ‘creative’ had to be done. People had to be encouraged to spend the money they weren’t spending on tickets to purchase consumer goods, mainly luxury consumer goods, with the FS taking a percentage of every sale. Just as when one doesn’t want to pay for website content one has to wait while dull advertisements pop up and fade, so now one would have to factor an extra five minutes into each journey to be transported as slowly as possible past shiny shop windows.
Will it work?
I fear not. On my next visit to Milan I studied the station situation carefully: although the metro stairway I had used to use to reach street level had been closed, there was still one available for people entering the metro from the piazza. So it was possible to ignore the signposting and the new tunnel, to walk straight up to ground level, and then to climb those forty-eight 1920s granite steps to the platforms without being drawn into the commercial labyrinth beneath. In fact, these once-daunting stairs were suddenly far busier than they had ever been; to quite a lot of people stone stairs began to feel like progress. A month or so after the great unveiling, a website was launched offering tips on
