But all of a sudden, I had an urge to head south. Perhaps it was the 150th anniversary of Italian unity in 2011 that started it. During the celebrations people in Milan and Verona just could not have been less interested, never mind festive. The Northern League, a powerful xenophobic and separatist faction in northern Italy, was depicting Garibaldi as a bandit, a terrorist, whose 1860 expedition with the glorious Mille to capture Sicily and the south had merely saddled the north with an unwanted burden and a constant source of cultural contamination. Everybody was talking federalism and autonomy. At the same time, David Gilmour’s book The Pursuit of Italy was making waves. Gilmour’s learned conclusion is that the Risorgimento was a huge mistake and that Italy would govern itself better if split up once more into a dozen city states. Frankly, I think that this is a complete misreading, a text-bound academic’s misreading, of Italian quarrels, like the friend who imagines a couple should split because they quarrel and talk about splitting. The truth is, you know the Italians are a people because the way they argue with each other is quite different from the way they argue with foreigners. It is their way of being together. Gilmour also underestimates a current of national idealism that runs beneath the surface of Italian cynicism. Garibaldi embodied that idealism. I for one have benefited enormously from the legacy he left, having spent almost all my adult life in a peaceful, united and, all things considered, relatively prosperous Italy.
But in any event and for whatever reason, fine words aside, I just wanted to head south. July 2012 was the time to do it, and the trains were the perfect way to travel. What better yardstick than the national railway for judging whether the south was really part of the nation? I would head down to Sicily, starting in Palermo, then, combining work and holiday, try to get around the coast of the island, then back to Calabria and right around the toe, instep and heel of the boot from west to east. That would mean pulling in towns like Reggio Calabria, Crotone, Taranto, and the splendid yellow-stone centro storico of Lecce, where Trenitalia hits the final buffer in distant Puglia. We would see if the FS of the extreme south was the same old FS I knew on the train of the living dead.
Yet I didn’t start the journey on state railways. For at last, at least on one stretch of line, those words ‘Thank you for choosing Trenitalia’ are no longer a mockery: from Turin to Milan to Rome and on to Naples, you can now travel with Italo.
In short, it was the completion of the high-speed line that finally brought a little real competition into being. The reasons are easy to understand: the infrastructural investment had been so huge that the government and the FS were desperate for anybody willing to pay to use it. There was plenty of spare capacity available. The high-speed lines had been equipped with a new form of electricity supply that ordinary freight and passenger trains couldn’t use. Trenitalia simply doesn’t have enough frecce to keep the lines busy if they wanted to. It was the perfect space for some ambitious entrepreneur to step into.
But it could hardly start without controversy.
Nuovo Transporto Viaggiatori (NTV) opened its new travel centre, Casa Italo, in a refurbished air terminal built beside the railway lines at Roma Ostiense, a secondary rail station in the west of the city. The handsome building, designed by Julio Lafuente for the 1990 World Cup, already housed a new branch of Eataly, the consortium of restaurants and shops selling traditional Italian food products.
The idea was that passengers for the new private rail service would park in the large adjacent car park, or simply emerge from the metro, buy their tickets in this clean, modern building, and step right onto the Italo, NTV’s new and rather beautiful maroon-coloured train, holder of the present world speed record, which departs from the open platform right beside the building and promises to make the trip to Milan in two hours and forty-five minutes.
Utopia.
However, the night before it opened, an eight-foot-high steel fence went up between the travel centre and the train it was providing tickets for. Passengers thus had to, and still have to, go down two flights of stairs, or an escalator, and walk through almost a thousand feet of underground passages before returning to ground level up more flights of stairs or another escalator (on which no doubt everyone is standing still) to reach the train, a few yards away from where they bought their tickets.
Who could have done such a silly thing? Rete Ferroviaria Italiana, of course, the part of the FS group that runs the rail infrastructure and that in fact stands to gain €140 million a year from Italo’s use of its high-speed lines. But, of course, RFI and Trenitalia
