During the trip, I thought I’d make a few notes to establish the peculiarity of these new Italo trains as opposed to the frecce: the generosity of the carriages, rather wider and higher than the frecce, with their stylish grey-and-orange fake leather seats; the extraordinarily clean – indeed, spick and span – toilets; the cinema carriage – can you imagine? – where a recent film is projected on decently large screens; in general, a smoother, far more stable and definitely quieter feel to the train. But very soon I put my pen down. The real difference in travelling on Italo has to do with an absence, a strange lightness: there are no Trenitalia personnel and no Trenitalia announcements. The girl who arrived in her smart maroon blazer behaved more like an air hostess than a ticket collector; I even had the illusion that she was there to serve me. As I went to the toilet, a man going in before me turned to allow me to go ahead. ‘No, that’s fine,’ I told him. Only then did I realise that what he was wearing was a kind of grey, dungaree uniform. He was carrying out a routine check of the toilets en voyage. It was hard to believe.
The Wi-Fi is free, and I went on the Italo website and looked up personale a bordo, on-board personnel. They had avoided the Trenitalia categories by using English for the job descriptions: train manager, train specialist (my man checking the toilets) and, yes, the hostess or steward. There was no mention at all that it was anyone’s duty to look at your ticket. One of the stewards was black; at last.
I ran a quick Google search on Italo and found an Economist article mentioning the famous fence down at Ostiense in Rome that keeps Italo passengers from their trains. ‘Ingrained hostility to competition,’ the English journalist said, was ‘something the Italians have to look at’. I find this kind of comment so right, but so wrong, as if the government could pass a law to resolve the problem, or as if hostility to competition wasn’t part of a deep ethos that is never going to change here without some massive national upheaval. The Italians invariably produce these monolithic organisations, the Catholic Church, the Ferrovie dello Stato or indeed the state itself, that they both identify with and feel hostile to. Throughout the post-war period the Italian state expanded into so many areas of industry, running some of the largest monopolies in Europe and proving itself one of the most generous sources of pensions and handouts in the whole world. At the local level whole towns are still willing to put their fate in the hands of one man, or company, as was the case with Turin and Fiat, with Parma and the Tanzis, and for a period with Milan and Berlusconi. Beneath all this lies a fear of being exposed to the competitive world and an overwhelming desire for protection; these powerful men, these powerful organisations will look after us. Our identity lies in belonging to them and then loathing them, accepting their bounty and disobeying them, evading their taxes, travelling without tickets, then voting for them, again and again. It is between the need for protection and the dream of liberty that Trenitalia’s Freccia and NTV’s Italo rush by each other on the high-speed lines between Milan and Rome, taking in Cosimo’s Florence on the way. The balance, or imbalance, between the two antithetical impulses can reasonably be measured by the relative sizes of the two companies: NTV has twenty-five trains, albeit of the latest, Italo-French designs. Trenitalia has thousands.
The main founding partner of NTV is Luca Cordero di Montezemolo, heir to a noble family for many generations hand in glove with the Italian royal family of Savoy. Montezemolo is president of Ferrari, has been executive chairman of Fiat and head of the Confederation of Italian Industry, and sits on the boards of various major companies. His junior partner, with whom he holds a controlling interest in NTV, is Diego Della Valle, heir to a shoe manufacturing empire and owner of Florence’s football club Fiorentina. This is big old north Italian business, backed to the tune of 20 per cent by French railways. Montezemolo and Della Valle must be old acquaintances with those heading Trenitalia and RFI. In the end the Ferrovie dello Stato has nothing to fear from them, the same way that the Fascists had nothing to fear from the big northern industrialists of the twenties and thirties. As long as these men are allowed a share of the action, they will not upset the apple cart.
Still, they must be made to suffer for their profits. Italo has not been given space to stop at Roma Termini, hub of all mobility in the city. Instead I stepped down at Tiburtina, a smaller, sadder version of Milan’s Porta Garibaldi. I took a picture of the driver climbing down from his futuristic locomotive. He seemed happy enough to be photographed with this great hunk of technology. Ten minutes later, shocked as I always am to see how drab and dingy the Rome metro is, I took another, contrasting picture. At once a uniformed metro man, invested with that air of public officialdom, hurried up to me wagging his finger and warning, in broken English, ‘No photo, no photo. Forbidden!’
How is it that Italians always know I’m not Italian, even before I
