The ticket sellers are patient. They don’t have a train to catch. Perhaps they like giving out information, they like demonstrating knowledge and expertise. At the place where the official queue emerges from its serpent of ropes, the point where you’re getting close to your turn, you’ll find it’s impossible to see the ticket window furthest to the left, because it’s hidden behind a pillar clad (for the World Cup) in a highly polished chocolaty-brown stone. This hidden window, I’ve noticed, is always in use, whereas those directly opposite the queue, and hence highly visible, are frequently closed. If you don’t know that the window behind the pillar is there, you don’t go to it. And the ticket seller doesn’t call to you. He has no buzzers to push, no warning lights to attract his customers. Trenitalia does not want to spoil us.
At the window to my right, someone is asking for the timetable for a complicated series of connections to a town in Liguria. The queue frets. ‘On which trains can I take my bicycle?’ he asks. Another furbo manages to sneak in when the window near the exit is momentarily free. This time the ticket seller protests, but half-heartedly. ‘I’ll be quick,’ il furbo says. ‘Otherwise I’ll miss my train.’
Nobody shouts. There is a slow, simmering resentment, as if the people who have behaved properly are grimly pleased to get confirmation that good citizenship is always futile, a kind of martyrdom. This is an important Italian emotion: I am behaving well and suffering because of that. I am a martyr. Mi sto sacrificando. It is a feeling that will justify some bad behaviour at the appropriate moment.
Do these people really need to ask for so much information at the ticket windows? No. There are excellent poster-size timetables showing all departures from the station. The Italians are good at this. There are cheap, comprehensive and just about comprehensible national timetables available at the station’s newsagent. They give you all the trains in northern Italy for a six-month period. There is an information office. For some reason the information office is at the other end of the station, perhaps fifty yards from the ticket windows – you have to walk down a long, elegantly paved corridor – and the timetables are not displayed near the ticket queue. This seems to be true in every station in Italy. It’s strange. You cannot consult train times while waiting in the queue, which might be exactly when you want to consult them. Of course you hurry to the queue without looking at the timetable, because you fear that if you don’t, you’ll lose your place and miss your train, but then at the window you have to ask for information. At one window a ticket seller patiently starts to explain the advantages and limitations of a complex promotional offer. The PA system announces the trains about to leave.
TO COPE WITH THIS stressful situation Trenitalia introduced the SportelloVeloce or FastTicket, as it’s also called. (Theses could be written about this habit of offering a translation that is not really a translation but as it were an Italian fantasy of how English works directed more at an Italian public, as a marketing operation, than at an English-speaking public on the move.) This is a window that you’re only supposed to use if your train departs within the next fifteen minutes. Sensibly, they placed the SportelloVeloce in the position where people usually sneak in to beat the main queue in its long snake between red ropes and chrome bars.
But what if my train leaves in half an hour? I stand in the queue for fifteen minutes, I see things are getting tight. Do I switch to the fast queue, where there are already four people? What if one of them asks for information? What if everybody decides that they can now arrive only fifteen minutes before the train leaves and use the fast queue? This would be a problem, because whereas at least two of the main windows are always open, the FastTicket window is frequently closed.
Or what if I queue at the SportelloVeloce twenty-five minutes before my train leaves but get to the ticket seller eighteen minutes before it leaves? Will he serve me? Probably yes, but he would be within his rights not to. Immigrants, in particular, tend to get turned away. I mean non-whites. And sometimes tourists. Foreign tourists. So do I have to go to the back of the queue? Can I keep him arguing for three minutes, at which point he would no longer be able to deny me a ticket? Unless perhaps my train is suddenly signalled as delayed for half an hour. Not an unusual occurrence. Or, since a standard rail ticket is valid for two months, what if I say I’m getting the Intercity to Bolzano leaving in five minutes, when in fact I’m planning to get it in two weeks? Is anybody going to check that I actually board today’s train? These are unanswered questions. FastTicket has not made ticket buying easier. A child could see this. So why was it introduced? The time has come to talk about image.
Use of English is always a clue. Readers will have noticed that only the slow trains now have Italian names, the Interregionale and, slower still, crawling doggedly from one watering hole to the next, the Regionale. These are the trains that need not be presented to the outside world, to the foreign businessman and the credit-card-holding tourist. The rolling stock is old and rattly. In summer you roast and in winter you freeze. The seats are narrow and hard, the cleaning … well, best take a deep breath before passing the toilet. But as soon as you start paying supplements you are in the territory of English, or at least international-speak. The proud old categories of Espresso, Rapido and Super-Rapido have largely
