The bar is a dismal affair, two young men utterly uninterested in their jobs selling coffee in plastic cups. The food display is entirely composed of arancini, the ball of fried rice with ragout inside that is a Sicilian speciality. I pass.
WATCHING THE COAST OF Calabria recede, or rather the uninspiring facades of the San Giovanni’s waterfront, and the coast of Sicily approach, a dark silhouette under a low but ferocious sun, I keep wondering why on earth they put the train on the boat. Perhaps some time ago when passenger carriages were mixed with freight wagons it had made sense to put the freight, which couldn’t get off and walk, on board.
But why now, when we’re all so used to carrying our bags – there are no porters in Italian stations – and they no longer mix freight and people?
There must be jobs at stake.
Although the ferry is mostly dismal, a sort of giant Meccano raft, and the toilets, the day I travelled, flooded, the funnel and upper structure have recently been repainted to blazon the logo RFI on the funnel: Rete Ferroviario Italiano. Names again. Image. Looking back over the ship’s wake, I can see other, more modern ferries zipping back and forth, no doubt with plenty of capacity for the rail travellers on this train. This is only a two-mile stretch of water. A week after this trip I would discover that in 2010 RFI had ordered a new ferry for the journey, again with the capacity to load rail carriages. The contract went to Nuovi Cantieri Apuania, a company based in Liguria, near Genoa. At the time, the managing director of the company remarked on the achievement of winning the €49 million contract against international competition and said how pleased he was that his men could now start working again after a period of idleness and lay-offs. One wonders if it would have won the contract if the commissioning organisation was not so closely allied to the Italian state. In any event, the new ship was now ready for service, but the shipyard workers were refusing to launch it until they received guarantees that they would not be laid off immediately afterwards. The obvious solution would be for RFI to spend another €49 million on another ship.
ON THE END OF the harbour wall, beneath a 150-foot column topped with a bronze statue of the Madonna, these words appear in huge letters:
VOS ET IPSAME CIVITATEM
BENEDICIMUS
As I took pictures in low sunlight, a mother beside me explained to her little boy that Messina was a città Mariana, and that while still alive the Madonna had met some men sent to Palestine from Messina and she had written them a letter to take back to Sicily that finished with these words, in Latin: ‘I bless you and your town.’ One can see how much more attractive such stories are than thoughts about the economics of ferry boats.
I had a bit of a panic getting down to the train again. You would have thought it was easy to find a train in the bottom of a boat, but actually, no. There were an extraordinary number of stairways and corridors and no signs telling passengers where to go, as if perhaps we hadn’t been supposed to leave our compartments at all. All the signs there were led you to the car deck. Eventually I did manage to retrace my steps and found a group of people down in the hold uncertain as to which was which of the two segments of train now side by side, one bound for Siracusa, one for Palermo. In the end, I spotted the languid soldier boy and followed him back to our compartment. It was encouraging to think that he could orient himself better than I could.
A long wait began. Our carriage crawled out of the boat into a dock siding and sat there for an hour. There was no explanation, no information. My fellow passengers grew angry. I wondered if my hotel would keep my room. Night fell. ‘Abandoned,’ the tubby woman announced again. ‘Sicily is completely abandoned. They despise us.’ Again she called her husband about her giramenti di testa, though she had seemed in fine fettle during our afternoon conversations and had said nothing about her health problems despite the suffocating heat in the compartment. Then everybody called relatives to warn them to delay their departure to the station. I was the only one, it seemed, who would be proceeding under my own steam on arrival. Fearing just such a delay, I had booked a hotel a hundred yards from the station.
Eventually the tubby woman lost her patience, jumped to her feet and, with no sign of any dizziness, rushed out onto the platform, where she had spotted the capotreno. Rather oddly he then accompanied her back to our compartment, poked his head in and explained that there was una collega, a ticket inspectress, who was late arriving because the train from Palermo was an hour and a half late. Ours was the last train from Messina to Palermo this evening, so we were waiting for her before departing, so she would be able to get back home.
While the man, avuncular and calmly authoritative in his uniform complete with green tie, was explaining this to us, it all seemed entirely reasonable and almost inevitable. Only when he had gone did the young girl, she of the Etruscan neck, wonder why two hundred people had to wait for one person who actually worked for the railways and could presumably be put up in a hotel if necessary.
‘When we get to Trapani it will already be time to leave,’ she wailed.
‘Una collega,’ the woman with the pink fan said pointedly. ‘It’s a woman they’re waiting for.’
‘The capotreno’s wife,’
