Out on the only platform, a nice old clock had a piece of white paper taped to its face bearing the word GUASTO in large computer-printed letters. broken. The station clock is largely irrelevant now, but when the railways began, time was not synchronised among the various Italian towns, each one deciding for itself, according to the rising and setting of the sun, what time it was. The introduction of the train and the consequent need for timetables across the territory led to synchronisation, with a decision made in 1866 that all cities would set their clocks to the time in Rome, this at a moment when Rome was not yet part of the kingdom, let alone the capital. In this regard it was a message the newly united Italy sent to the Pope, who still claimed the right to be temporal ruler of the city, that actually Rome’s time was Italy’s and the two states must soon be one.
Aside from the weighing machine and the broken clock, this tiny station at pretty well the southernmost point of Sicily looked exactly like any small station on the northern border with Switzerland. There were the same blue signs and warnings you find in all the stations, all brand new, all with the same typeface. Vietato l’accesso carried the same fines here as it did at Porta Vescovo. There were the same ugly metal window fittings, the same yellow line painted on the platform, with the notice declaring, Non oltrepassare la linea gialla, and in English, Do not go beyond the yellow line. In this sense the Ferrovie dello Stato do indeed unite the country, tying it up in a web whose nodal points must feel the same from Brunico in the South Tyrol all the way down to the toe of Calabria. It was both reassuring and disappointing.
A train appeared around the bend. In truth it was only ten minutes late, though it looked like it had come from another age, a single diesel-driven carriage at least forty years old. The line hasn’t been electrified. On board there was a powerful smell of diesel, and a rattling air conditioner that just about managed to keep the temperature bearable. The seats were fairly recent, but everything else had been left as it was. At the end of the carriage a tiny section of eight seats behind a glass screen bore the announcement Prima Classe. It was hard to see in what way it was different from second. On the driver’s door, the typeface for the warning VIETATO L’INGRESSO was straight out of the sixties and, instead of being first, ahead of the French and German, as it always is today, the English translation was last, reminding you that in those days English was not yet everyone’s second tongue. NO ADMITTANCE, it said, instead of today’s NO ENTRY. No admittance. The old-fashioned formula and the antique typeface put me in an excellent mood. There are certain train environments that immediately give me the feeling that I am protected, at least for the duration of the journey. I am almost back in my childhood. Nothing can go wrong. Perhaps because this place isn’t really part of the modern world.
FROM MODICA THE TRAIN made a generous detour to the south, to Scicli, before turning east along the coast. The ticket inspector spent most of the time ensconced in the cabin with the driver. At each station he emerged, nondescript, in his forties, looked up and down the empty platform, then waved his green flag for the driver, a whole two yards away, to close the doors. Two men and a vehicle from the 1960s to transport half a dozen people forty-five miles in an hour and a half. When eventually he decided to confront me and I showed him the piece of paper with my Internet ticket, which Giuseppe had kindly printed out on the hotel computer, he suddenly grew alert. He looked at it as one finally faced with something he has been warned about but thankfully has so far been spared. He stared at it for a while, then asked me to wait a minute and took it away to show to the driver. Ten minutes later he was back; he frowned, handed over the paper and made no comment.
The landscape is flat and fertile here in the south-eastern corner of Sicily: olive groves, bamboo, kiwis; long grey greenhouses, some in use, some abandoned. Here and there the earth was deeply scored by dry streams – torrenti, as the Italians say. I read on my Kindle and photographed obsolete bric-a-brac on the stations. On one platform there was an antique lamp post combined with some sort of pumping device, deeply rusted but somehow dignified and elegant, certainly worth many a modern sculpture. Cactuses of the variety you see in spaghetti westerns lined the rails, and there were glimpses of the sea across the plain as we cut the corner of the island, turning north. On the wall in a station called Avola somebody had scrawled, Tanto il resto cambia (After all, everything else changes). The central platform here was so narrow that the two yellow lines to distance you from the platform edges left no standing room between.
A large woman now boarded the train, a woman of a kind you don’t see up north. She was very brown and very tubby, in her mid-fifties perhaps, but glamorous. Her
