‘Happens every day,’ the inspector explained on his return a little later. ‘They get on, get themselves thrown off at the next station, then get on the next train and get a free ride to the next station and so on, till they get where they’re going. You can’t throw them out of the window, you can’t make them pay money they haven’t got, the police can’t be bothered to arrest them. Since the fast trains only stop at Bologna and Florence, she’ll be in Rome before the day is out, if that’s really where she wants to go. But maybe she just wants to keep warm and will get on the first train to somewhere else. Or back to Verona.’
On arrival in Florence, I found the train stopped not, as I had expected, at Santa Maria Novella, the town’s main station, just five minutes’ walk from Palazzo Strozzi, but at the sad suburban station of Firenze Campo Marte. Could I, I asked a capotreno hurrying along the platform, use my Freccia ticket on a local train to Santa Maria Novella, or would I have to go to the ticket office for another ticket?
‘Platform one,’ he said as he waved. ‘Plenty of trains.’
‘But do I need a new ticket? I just came from Verona on the Frecciargento, but now I see the ticket is just to Campo Marte.’
He was already off, speaking over his shoulder. ‘They won’t fine you,’ he said with an enigmatic laugh.
So, I reflected, my ticket was not officially valid for Santa Maria Novella, but nobody would have the courage to complain, since my investment in the Frecciargento was considerable and was supposed to take me to Florence, not to an outlying station. I was one of the blessed. To him that hath …
THE BLESSED UNDERSTAND ENGLISH. They have credit. They buy their tickets online. They don’t speak dialect but proper, accentless Italian. Their values are cleanliness and speed. I think it was standing on that platform at Firenze Campo Marte that I first heard the new announcers whose voices you now hear in every station, large or small, from the far north of Italy to the deep south, imposing the new, suave Trenitalia feel on the whole peninsula; first a man’s voice, Italian, young, educated and eager to persuade, without any regional inflections, then a woman’s voice, in English. She too seems young, efficient, knowledgeable and unplaceable.
Unplaceable in England, that is, but very English, not American or even transatlantic. The funny thing is that although she reads the Italian names of the stations – Roma instead of an English Rome, Firenze instead of Florence, Napoli instead of Naples – she pronounces them with a strong, even exaggerated, English accent, making no concessions at all to the Italian vowel sounds or rolled r’s. So we have, Roe-mah, Na-poe-lee, Mi-lah-noe, Fi-ren-say, and so on. The effect is hilarious, but funniest of all is her pronunciation of Trenitalia, which she manages to rhyme with genitalia. Since we all know that Italy is pronounced with the a of ‘fat’, not of ‘fate’, it’s hard to imagine how anyone could make a mistake like this; indeed, it begins to sound as if the announcements were deliberately making fun of the Englishman’s, or in this case Englishwoman’s, famed incompetence with foreign languages. Or maybe some PR man who has learned to pronounce the Queen’s English at some upmarket language school has imagined that English people will only recognise the names if pronounced this way, despite the fact that the English announcements are not uniquely for the English, but for every foreign national with no Italian. In any event, I feel sure that this woman knows the proper pronunciations and is hamming it. She’s having fun. And you can see a lot of Italian passengers are enjoying it too. For them it has the welcome effect of making the speakers of this globally dominant language seem stupid. Trenitayliah five seven zero to Ve-ne-ziaah … Trenitayliah two one nine to Pad-you-ah, Trenitayliah eight six one to Doe-moe-dossoe-lah …
NEEDLESS TO SAY, TRENITALIA’S reorganisation of the train service into a world of first- and second-class citizens would not be complete without a complete overhaul of ticketing policy, which now entirely conditions these trips of mine to Florence. In the nineties there was a maximum promiscuity and flexibility between trains and people, as if passengers on a Regionale from Bergamo to Treviglio actually belonged to the same species as those signori and signore travelling on a Super Rapido from Milan to Turin. All tickets were valid for sixty days, and all could be upgraded with supplements. Now instead we have maximum segregation and rigidity; yet it was all done so stealthily, so gradually, that none of us really saw the logic of it until the operation was complete.
For me the moment of transition, or awakening, definitely came one morning in 2008 on a Verona–Milan Intercity. I was in the perfect situation of sharing a compartment with a man and a woman both as eager as myself to read and work. Then all of a sudden, a clamour of children! English children! There were scores of them. ‘Quiet, kids! Quiet!’ A man in Boy Scout shorts and sandals with socks peered into our compartment. He began to look at a ticket and to compare the numbers on it with the seat numbers indicated outside our compartment. The sticky fingers and red noses of his charges pressed against
