fn1 For these quotations I am indebted to Stefano Maggi’s excellent book Le ferrovie (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2003).
Chapter 4
MILANO–FIRENZE
NO SOONER HAD we got used to this revolution in mobilità, or lack of it, than the countdown outside the station was suddenly over. On 14 December 2008, the much-heralded train departed and, yes, arrived in Bologna just one hour later – right on time. Soon it would be pushing on to Florence, then Rome, then Naples. Soon it would be heading west from Milan to Novara, then Turin. By 2010 hourly trains were departing from Milan and racing three hundred miles non-stop to Rome in just two hours, fifty minutes. Imagine Boston to New York, city centre to city centre, in an hour and forty-five, or London to Edinburgh in three hours, and you have the idea. Forget the train of the living dead. Forget the first-class fiasco on the Venezia– Milano Interregionale. This is serious! All of a sudden Trenitalia was winning back passengers from car and plane.
But how exactly was it paid for? It’s reckoned that to lay the six hundred miles of seamless rails that only the high-speed trains can use all the way from Naples to Turin, cutting new tunnels and building new viaducts, must have cost some €150 billion, a simply vast amount of money that was never written into any government budget. At a certain point the European Community intervened to insist that the huge loans taken out by the rail company figure as part of the Italian national debt and not simply as private company debts, since everyone knew that in the last resort they were underwritten by the state. Aside from the loans, it’s clear that a significant part of the government grant that was supposed to support humbler rail services through stations like Porta Vescovo was switched to investment in the high-speed project and quite possibly the redevelopment of Milano Centrale into an upmarket shopping mall. So the living dead are pushed deeper into their unquiet graves to breathe life and speed into those who can pay to travel fast enough to have time for a spot of shopping at each end. To him that hath, more shall be given: and from him that hath not, even that which he hath – a halfway decent regional rail service, practical stations with reasonable mobilità – shall be taken away.
All the same, as Mark Twain concluded his discussion of mad Italian spending on the railways in the 1860s, ‘it is an ill wind that blows nobody good’. Up and running, enjoyed and used by thousands, the high-speed trains have become their own justification. I for one would never wish they hadn’t been built.
THE OLD NAMES ARE GONE. That was inevitable. Gone the Gianduia to Venice, gone the Michelangelo to Rome, gone the Andrea Doria to Genoa. Gone the proud announcements reverberating through the station and the beautiful words appearing on the departures board. Every big change in the railways brings a revolution in nomenclature and ticketing. So these screamingly fast new trains are called frecce, arrows. This switch back to Italian suggests a new pride and confidence; the Frecciarossa, or Red Arrow, built in Italy by Fiat and Associates, travels at 200 miles per hour, running exclusively on dedicated rails. After the Red Arrow there is also the Frecciargento, the Silver Arrow, which goes at 150 miles per hour on dedicated and ordinary rails, and the Frecciabianca, or White Arrow, which goes at 125 miles per hour on the old, ordinary rails we know so well. It was the arrival of the Frecciarossa, which takes you from Milan to Florence in an hour and forty-five, and again of the Frecciargento, which does Verona to Florence in an hour and thirty, that made it possible for me, in 2009, to make the major mistake of accepting an invitation to curate an art exhibition in Florence.
Back in 2005 I had published a little book, Medici Money, which talked about the way a tension between moneymaking and medieval Christianity had flowered in the ambiguous but indisputably beautiful territory of Renaissance art. The ban on usury, a word that at that time referred to any interest-bearing loans, expressed the Church’s rejection of the idea that the mind should focus on money and social mobility. People should accept their position on the medieval estates and concentrate their aspirations on the afterlife. However, the bankers, or some of them, showed everyone that getting rich was not just about counting florins; they also invested in education, art and architecture, seduced the clergy by financing major Church renovation projects, and in the process commissioned some of the finest paintings and sculptures ever made. So the once cold and austere spaces of a timeless liturgy began to take on a decidedly bourgeois, well-dressed fashion feel, something no one had expected or planned for. In the end the tension between Christian purists who resented the mercenary invasion of their sanctuaries and the wealthy classes who felt that their taste, hard work and charity should surely get them straight to heaven, exploded first in Savonarola’s Bonfire of the Vanities, then in Luther’s Reformation.
It’s curious. There’s a direct link between the medieval Church’s objection to social mobility and to Pope Gregory XVI’s 1840s condemnation of the railways as the work of Satan. In the early nineteenth century the Papal States of central Italy were among the most backward and static territories in Europe, perhaps nearer to the world of the medieval estates than to our highly mobile capitalism today. The train, Gregory realised, would allow people to get moving, from home to a distant place of work, or from one town to another. Doing so, they would lose contact with their proper place in the world; free from the watchful eyes of parents, partners and children, men and women would start
