Again, since the same people were sitting on the boards of these supposedly different companies, these changes seemed more about theatre than substance. What did change things for the passengers was that Trenitalia was now further split into different sections, each under orders not to lose too much money. As a result, the Interregionali and the Intercities are now accounted for separately, and the Eurostars separately again. Hence one can no longer buy a regular ticket plus a separate supplement and decide at the last moment which train to get. No, now you have to tell the ticket seller what train you’ll be travelling on (time and day) and he has to locate that train on the computer screen before printing the ticket so that the money you pay can go to one company rather than the other, even though actually they’re all part of the same company. Strangely, though, the ticket you buy is valid for two months and hence it’s perfectly legitimate not to get on the exact train you referred to when you bought the ticket. Isn’t that weird? So if you buy an Intercity ticket, with its supplement included, you’ll be able to travel, if the fancy takes you, on a cheaper Interregionale, though not vice versa, of course.
Is this actually a recognised rule, written somewhere, or just common sense; I mean, that you can use a more expensive ticket for a cheaper train but not the other way round? I really don’t know, but recently I witnessed a situation where a rather beautiful young woman, raven hair, the kind of breasts that Italians call prosperose, was told she would have to pay a fine for travelling on an Intercity with a more expensive Eurostar ticket. Only a mutiny of the surrounding passengers saved her. The whole scene must have lasted twenty minutes and eventually involved five or six people. She was, as I said, an attractive lady.
So to keep things brief, you can no longer buy five or six Interregionali tickets and a few supplements and take whatever train is most convenient, because the Intercity ticket now has the supplement built in. However, Beppe tells me, if I get an annual season ticket for the Interregionale, I will be allowed, as a very special favour for having spent so much money, to buy separate supplementi – they do still exist, then – to travel on Intercities for individual trips, if, and only if, at the moment of purchase of the supplements, I am able to show my season ticket and a valid ID (I love the expression ‘valid ID’). The ticket seller will then type into his computer (using two fingers) my name and the number (the rather long number) of my season ticket so that the journey can be moved in accounting terms from one service to another, thus making the railways more efficient. Alas, because of the need to show an ID, this special favour supplement is not available at the ticket machines. I’ll have to join the queue.
It’s a drag, but I agree to this. I can buy half a dozen supplementi at a time, I decide, restricting my trips to the ticket window to a minimum. For €670, then, at the time about £550, Beppe gives me a ticket that looks exactly like any other Trenitalia ticket and indeed any other supplement: a piece of soft cardboard about seven inches by two and a half with a pink-and-blue-patterned background and faded computer print above. The only thing that distinguishes this ticket from the one that costs €6.82 is the word ANNUALE, which occupies approximately one hundredth of the ticket’s surface area. It’s clear I’ll have to stick a piece of coloured tape on this ticket to distinguish it from the supplementi I buy. And I’ll have to laminate it to stop it from disintegrating in my wallet.
Beppe wanders off to make a photocopy of the ticket in case I lose it. In fact he makes two photocopies, one for me and one for the ticket office. That’s generous. They keep a file. He opens an old metal cupboard. All this takes him five minutes and more. The photocopier has to warm up. Then he starts to ask after my family and he’s expecting, of course, that I’ll ask after his. I do. I’m getting embarrassed because at 6.35 a.m. the queue behind me is long and there is a mill of worried people around the FastTicket window. The train of the living dead has been announced as ‘in partenza’, about to depart. His son is doing very well at school, Beppe is explaining. I know that if I protested that we shouldn’t be exchanging pleasantries in these circumstances, with other people waiting, he would imagine that I didn’t want to talk to him. His daughter less so, he says, unfortunately. She doesn’t seem to take her teachers seriously. Beppe would never really understand that I was worried about the others in the ticket queue. Why should I be? Personal relationships come before civic sense. Salutami la Rita, he calls. My wife.
MY TICKET SAYS ‘da convalidare’ at one end. For the past ten years or so they’ve been making us insert our tickets into a little yellow stamping machine before we get on the train. The idea is that if the ticket inspector on the train doesn’t manage to check your ticket (with its two-month validity), you still won’t be able to use it again, stamped as it now is with one particular time and date: the convalida. But the ink in the stamping machines is usually so faded that, assuming the inspector doesn’t come along and punch a hole in it, I am sure you could use the same
