But Sandals and Socks opens the door and tells us in halting Italian that all our places are reserved. ‘PREE-NOH-TAA-TEE,’ he said. Prenotati = booked. The poor man seemed embarrassed to have to tell us this. ‘Noy’ – he pointed his fingers at himself and the children making manic faces through the glass – ‘booked, pree-noh-taa-tee.’
I didn’t smile. The Scoutmaster insisted on showing us their group ticket. Sure enough, they had booked. But how could this be? ‘It’s the new rule,’ said the woman grimly, packing away her papers. ‘They don’t put up the little reservation cards any more. As of a couple of weeks ago.’
‘So how do you know where to sit?’ I asked.
‘You don’t,’ she said. ‘You just sit until they move you.’
The capotreno arrived. I asked him if it was true that we couldn’t know where to sit any more, that they weren’t indicating the reserved seats. ‘You obviously don’t read the notices we put up to explain the situation,’ he said. Squeezing through the crowded corridor from one carriage to another, I now had time to read one of these notices, posted in Italian only. ‘Seats 71–86 of each carriage [two compartments] cannot be reserved,’ it said. All the other seats could be reserved, but reservation cards would no longer be displayed. There was no explanation for this change. Passengers were kindly invited to show maximum willingness in giving up their seats to passengers with reservations.
Overnight, then, the person who didn’t pay an extra €3 to book had become a second-class citizen. He could no longer know if a seat was free unless he was willing to go to the ghetto of compartments six and seven, which, of course, were always full. A couple of years later even this tenuous existence was denied him. All Intercities, Eurostars and now frecce would be a prenotazione obbligatoria, reserved seats only. ‘La comodità è d’obbligo,’ announced a Trenitalia slogan. ‘Convenience is a must.’ The implication, of course, was that the regional trains were not convenient, since there you couldn’t book a seat even if you wanted to. It was perhaps to make up for this that the old Interregionale was suddenly renamed the Regionale Veloce, the fast regional. When one thinks of all the expense of respraying carriages and re-recording announcements and reprinting timetables just to make this meaningless change, the mind boggles.
So now you always had to know what train you wanted to travel on, even with an Intercity, and book for that alone, a great loss of flexibility. Since people who travel on expensive trains don’t want to hang around in queues, that meant you were more or less obliged to book online with a credit card. Obviously prices were adjusted to include the old booking charge. Then came what Italians call the beffa, a single word that means ‘the trick that adds insult to injury’. If you paid a further 25 per cent surcharge for a so-called Flexi ticket you would have the luxury, in the event of missing the train you were booked on, of being allowed to take the first train after that without paying any fine or surcharge. Otherwise there would be an automatic fine of €8; oddly, 25 per cent of an expensive ticket is often more than €8.
To recap, then, while in the past one had maximum flexibility for price X at the slight risk of not finding a seat, something you could nevertheless sort out if you knew you were travelling at a busy time by adding a reservation for price X+Y, now you always pay X+Y and always have a seat but no flexibility unless you pay price X+Y+Z, when you have your seat and a little flexibility, but nothing like what you had years ago just paying X.
The bottom line is that Trenitalia privileges computer-savvy passengers with credit cards who will occupy reserved seats on clean, fashionable, very fast trains and who will even be permitted to show their ticket as a PDF on their laptops, or an SMS on their mobiles, while those without cards are cast into outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. In 2011 the ancient ticket machines in Porta Vescovo were replaced by the new, rather beautiful and wonderfully efficient credit-card-only touch-screen machines; the speed of operation and discreetly presented range of options are simply remarkable. However, in the station’s little bar the charming barista tells me that the ticket-selling side of her work has more than doubled since the arrival of these breakthrough machines because none of the passengers using Porta Vescovo – schoolchildren, students, immigrant labourers – have credit cards. But of course these people don’t take expensive trains, so Trenitalia is not interested in them. More often than not even these splendid machines are broken because someone has deliberately jammed the place where you slot in your credit card.
HOWEVER, I SHOULDN’T COMPLAIN; a man curating a show about bankers with paintings by Botticelli and the Beato Angelico is clearly among the privileged and the blessed, and hence liberated from the purgatory of ticket machines. Like Cosimo de’ Medici & Co. he has bought his place in paradise. Freed from all restraints – disembodied, it sometimes seems – I journey back and forth from Verona or Milan to Florence, from Florence to Milan or Verona, at extraordinary speeds and with remarkable punctuality, showing the inspector my first-class ticket, generously emailed to me by Palazzo Strozzi, on my laptop. In first class I have a choice of orange juice, wine or coffee when I get on. There is also a power outlet for my laptop. The air conditioning is reliable. The toilets are relatively clean. What more could one want?
Naturally, I soon grow accustomed to these blessings. I try a trip to Rome and discover that the train really does
