Needless to say, Italo hasn’t been allowed to leave from Milano Centrale, but from Milan’s ugly secondary station of Porta Garibaldi, about half a mile away. If the revolutionary fighter’s story is remarkable for clarity of trajectory, for flamboyance in idealism, for focus and consistency of purpose, as when, having beaten the Austrians by Lake Como, he marched gloriously into Milan right at this part of the city in 1859, Stazione Garibaldi is an amorphous, sprawling mess. And while Garibaldi the hero is immediately acknowledged as achieving a spiritual aristocracy worthy of the grandeur of Milano Centrale, Garibaldi FS is the home of the humdrum, arrival point of tens of thousands of yawning commuters brought in daily from the north and west on endless convoys of miserable regionali.
There is nothing here that declares itself as a main entrance. The shapeless building bleeds its travellers into the surrounding streets from any number of open wounds. Running around its glass-and-concrete facade is Viale Don Luigi Sturzo, a fast, nondescript road immediately linking to faster, more nondescript motorways rushing people out of town. Don Luigi Sturzo was the Sicilian priest who in 1919 formed the Partito Popolare Italiano, forerunner of the Christian Democrat Party. As such he championed the notion of Catholics engaging in politics as a group with its own agenda, which, of course, did not necessarily correspond to a national agenda. Garibaldi would have loathed such an idea. It has sometimes occurred to me that the Ferrovie dello Stato are a kind of Catholic Church. It has that suffocating monopoly status of being more important than its supposed principles and goals, ‘a state within a state’, as one politician called it, as early as 1870. In that case Italo might be a hateful, freethinking, nonconformist rebel, bearer of the gospel of real competition. In any event, it feels like a good omen for my trip to Sicily and the south to leave from Stazione Garibaldi.
Comically, to the eastern end of the station, Viale Don Luigi Sturzo runs through Piazza Sigmund Freud. I doubt that the Austrian therapist would have made much progress with the dysfunctional national family implied by the names of Garibaldi and Sturzo. In fact, the piazza is now a mess of rubble in the ongoing process of redevelopment that has made this part of Milan the most modern and the most unliveable and unwalkable. One evening, returning from Florence, my train stopped in Porta Garibaldi rather than Centrale. It was onward bound to Turin, and Garibaldi has the advantage that trains can run through it without having to be turned round. Climbing down on the platform, it was not immediately obvious which way one was supposed to go to exit the station. I set off down a staircase and found a corridor at the bottom but no signs or directions. ‘Where’s the metro?’ I asked the girl walking down behind me. Since it was late at night, she seemed anxious that I might be trying to approach her. How could there not be signs for a metro in a major railway station? She looked around and frowned.
Two men now came down the stairs. ‘Do you know which is the direction to the metro?’ They didn’t. They also were looking for the metro. ‘I think it’s this way,’ one of them said. We went down the tunnel, turned a corner, were confronted with other tunnels, escalators. There were the names of roads, there were numbers of platforms, but no signs for the metro. Eventually we climbed stairs to find ourselves on a tarmac pavement running beside a wall beneath an elevated highway. All four of us, now united in our contempt for whoever was responsible for la mobilità in Porta Garibaldi, decided we had better turn right. After five minutes walking in that direction we gave up, turned round and walked ten minutes in the other direction, finally discovering the so-called front of the station and the metro some twenty minutes after our train had dumped us on a gloomy platform. Garibaldi, it has to be said, was famous for being able to lead his men rapidly at night through the most arduous and uncharted terrain.
So when I went to catch the Italo I left much earlier than theoretically I needed to. This was just as well. RFI had hidden Italo on an underground platform under a little mare’s nest of escalators. As I would soon discover, in all the stations where Italo operates the tension between the new company’s desire to give visibility to its services and the old organisation’s determination that it not be allowed to develop any special profile is everywhere evident. Does a sign indicating where a train leaves from amount to publicity? I suppose if you never wanted the train to exist in the first place, it possibly does. In the same way, Italian taxi drivers are famous for removing signs at airports that indicate where you might catch a cheap bus into town.
I was travelling not in second class, not in first, not in business,
