Today’s Pope has his own dedicated Frecciarossa when he travels. A YouTube video shows crowds on a platform in Spoleto, Umbria, waving as the papal train passes through without stopping. This was 2011. It’s a strange meeting of ancient and modern. The streamlined nose of the Freccia and its darkened, shockproof windows slide smoothly by while a bunch of celebrants, with Spoleto’s mayor at their head, cheer loudly. The camera searches through the windows of the passing train, eventually finding a man in white robes propped in a standing position – these trains can sway dangerously through stations – raising an arm to greet people whom he can’t possibly see. For perhaps a second his ghostly salute flashes across the screen left to right, more fugitive and unnatural than any appearance of the Madonna. The good citizens of Spoleto must have wondered whether they had really seen him. For all the derision that met his objections, Pope Gregory, I’m sure, would feel he had understood trains perfectly.
In any event, this book of mine had led to an invitation to curate an exhibition in Florence at Palazzo Strozzi, a sort of Donald Trump ostentation of the fifteenth century, built, massively and threateningly, with money from the Strozzi family bank. Since regular trips to Florence would be required, the high-speed miracle made possible something that years before I might have wisely refused, since this was a complete distraction from my ordinary life. All of a sudden here I was a regular traveller on a work of Satan, shuttling back and forth to Florence at demonic speeds, to organise an exhibition on another of Satan’s masterpieces, the banking techniques that enabled the Medici et al. to circumvent the usury ban and turn the churches of the Renaissance into extensions of their living rooms, in much the same way that the austere Fascist trappings of Milano Centrale have been turned into a version of Macy’s.
It didn’t start well. My Frecciargento was scheduled to leave Verona Porta Nuova shortly before seven o’clock on a February morning with the temperature some fifteen degrees below zero, a once-a-year occurrence in this part of the world. Finding that many of the trains were delayed due to frozen switches, and in particular that my Freccia was posting a half-hour delay, I climbed the stairs to the platform to see if the train was there by any chance and, hopefully, heated. There was no sign of it.
The air was bitter. My overcoat wasn’t made for it. I scuttled downstairs back into the station, but the waiting room was not yet open. This waiting room, which was notorious for not allowing eating or drinking, a rule regularly policed by unexpectedly zealous station staff, has since been closed to make way – surprise, surprise – for a small area of shops. In the meantime the station, like many others in northern Italy, has been filled with TV screens, scores of them. They are attractive, flat screens in polished metal frames, placed, for example, above your head as you climb down any of the three staircases on the station’s twelve platforms, and delivering not, as you might expect, information about train departures and arrivals, but non-stop advertisements, each of about thirty seconds. So moving through the station shortly before seven o’clock on this freezing morning, looking for somewhere warm to wait out the delay, I was able to observe, as always, luscious close-ups of ladies’ undergarments hugging perfect, perfumed flesh, images of pasta disappearing between lusciously perfect female lips, luscious breasts on a perfect young woman changing her clothes in a car, and so on. There were also many large posters of Silvio Berlusconi hanging on thin chains from the high ceiling. An election had been announced. The brief government run by Romano Prodi, a ramshackle coalition of the left, had given up the ghost.
The departures board now told me that my train was delayed for eighty minutes. This meant I could safely sit down for a coffee. There may be no waiting room when you need it, but there is a choice of bars: a regular Trenitalia bar at one end of the station and a McDonald’s franchise that combines Italian bar and McDonald’s counter at the other. The latter has the great advantage that seating is free, and since eighty minutes is eighty minutes, that’s where I headed.
I got my cappuccino and croissant, sat down, and began to think about Berlusconi’s smile. What a strange mixture it was, I thought, of comfortable self-congratulation (I’m a hugely successful man, you can rely on me) and victimhood (I am a scapegoat who has been treated badly), as if he were both a first-class Freccia traveller and a long-suffering victim standing in the corridor of a packed Regionale. Quite how Berlusconi manages to convey these contradictory impressions I’m not sure, but they seem to contain a paradox essential to the contemporary Italian mindset: we are simultaneously well off and not well off; we deserve excellent services but we are already paying too much for them; we are confident and hard done by.
At this point I had to move my seat. The fact is that with the station open but the waiting room closed, all those poor folks who had somehow got through the night in the icy waste of the piazza outside were invading McDonald’s, where indeed half the tables had been roped off, no doubt to discourage this loitering. I noticed a Gypsy woman at the bar getting a flask filled with hot water and then asking for the key to the toilet. The
