by Tim Parks
First class is full. It’s packed. It’s asphyxiating. There’s not a seat to be had. People are standing all down the aisle. The heat is on maximum and the air is unbreathable. Dismayed, there’s nothing you can do but push your way to the middle of the carriage and laugh at yourself for having thrown away the cash.
I stand and try to read. There are people who, however packed a train is, always believe that it is worth moving along from one carriage to the next, even if other people are moving in the other direction in the same vain hope. I try to make myself very slim as backpacks push behind me. The train does not empty at Verona Porta Nuova as I hoped it might. Nobody gets off at Peschiera fifteen minutes later. Rather, there are more getting on, families who’ve taken advantage of a bright cold day to go to Gardaland.
Then just before Desenzano there’s a sudden stirring. People are standing up. People are pushing down the carriage towards the door behind me. How odd, I think, that so many people would be getting off at the small lake station of Desenzano. There must be some event on, some carnival occasion.
No, it’s the ticket inspector. The man with the green cap has just appeared up the aisle.
Two minutes later, I’m sitting comfortably in a half-empty carriage. ‘Passengers are advised to check,’ runs one regular recorded announcement, ‘that the class indicated on their documento di viaggio corresponds to the class of seats they are actually occupying.’ The appearance of the inspector has inspired a good fifty people to take that advice and flee.
If ever smug self-righteousness were tangible, it is now. There is a grim satisfaction on the faces of those who remain, the faces of the good citizens who have actually paid for their first-class ticket. For myself, I’m relieved to be sitting and able to work, but not sure that I’m entirely happy with the spirit of this. The rest of the train will now be even more packed and asphyxiating. Those who fled included the aged and infirm. Now I’m feeling guilty for the luxury I have paid for. However, some minutes after the inspector has gone, people begin to drift back from second class. It’s a scandal, an elderly lady remarks complacently as she settles herself beside me, to leave these seats empty while people are standing.
This scenario was repeated on three of the five remaining occasions when I used my first-class tickets. On the other two, the ticket inspector never passed by and I stood the whole way.
On one trip I met someone who had an interesting take on the situation. Having bagged a seat at Verona Porta Nuova, I offered to help the girl opposite me put her big bag up on the rack, since it was occupying the space between us, preventing us from stretching our legs. She shook her head. ‘Hardly worth it,’ she says. She doesn’t have a first-class ticket, she explains, so will probably have to move on soon. ‘Just that there’s nowhere else to sit in the entire train.’ She says this as if she had checked every single carriage herself. In the meantime other people around us are standing, some of whom perhaps do have first-class tickets. But the girl is pleasant and I choose not to comment.
‘They should have more of these Interregionali,’ she goes on, not by way of justification; she’s merely remarking that the demand is there and should be satisfied. ‘The Intercity costs twice as much,’ she explains, as if someone with a trace of foreign accent could not know that.
‘The reason they don’t have more,’ I point out, ‘is that they wouldn’t make any money at all if everybody travelled to Milan for nine euros.’
‘That’s true,’ she says equably.
‘I suppose that’s why people pay a bit extra for first class,’ I observe, pointedly, I hope. ‘To sit.’
‘If they can afford first class,’ she says, ‘I can’t see why they don’t get the faster train.’
‘Maybe it doesn’t stop at their station. It doesn’t stop where I get on, for example.’
‘Right, it must be that,’ she agrees. Nothing I say seems to undermine her confidence in what she originally said, despite her acknowledgement that I have a point.
The inspector appears, but the girl doesn’t get up and hurry off with the others. Very calmly and naturally she shows the inspector her ticket.
‘This is a second-class ticket, signorina,’ he observes, ‘and you are in first class.’
The girl looks around with an air of vague surprise.
‘Is it?’
But she isn’t really trying to fool him. The naive gesture is sketched; it’s just enough to allow the inspector to act as if she hadn’t understood.
‘Well, signorina, you’ll have to move,’ he says. He likes calling her signorina. The girl half stands and the inspector moves on down the now pleasantly free carriage. All those remaining are handing him regular first-class tickets with affable smiles. The girl continues to fuss with her bags, pulling things out and putting them back in and arranging this and that until quite suddenly she sits down again, slumps low in the seat so her blonde head is beneath the top of the backrest, and closes her eyes.
‘He’s gone,’ I tell her after another minute. She opens one eye, smiles, opens the other, laughs, pushes a hand through her lovely hair, then fusses in her bag and brings out an economics textbook. She has to study.
I ask, ‘What will you do when he comes back?’
She frowns. ‘It’ll take him a while to get down the train. It’s very crowded.’
‘He’ll have his assistant working up from the other end.’
‘We’ll see,’ she says.
‘Theoretically he could get nasty.’
‘Theoretically,’ she agrees. ‘But I don’t think so.’
I realise that I’m dealing with someone more integrated in this society than I can ever hope to be.
‘Why not?’
‘They’re not serious about first class, are they?’
I raise an eyebrow.
‘When you travel on a bus without a ticket, what happens? If an inspector gets on, he blocks the doors of the bus and anyone freeloading is fined. That’s serious. They could easily get the two inspectors to arrive at the opposite doors of first class and fine everyone with a second-class ticket.’
‘They could.’ I had never thought of this.
‘If I went into first class in a Eurostar, they’d fine me at once.’
‘But not here.’
‘They’re not serious.’
‘But why not?’
She frowns. Clearly she is a serious student.
‘I think they would rather all these people paying for first class moved to the faster trains. The poveretti here and the benestanti there.’
Poor and rich.
I ask, ‘So why offer first class at all?’
‘They have the carriages. Someone is always stupid enough to pay, even when they don’t get a service.’
‘Grazie.’
‘Prego,’ she says with a laugh.
IF THE FERROVIE DELLO stato are not serious about class distinctions on the Regionali, when you arrive at Milano Centrale it becomes all too obvious what they do care about. Here a revolution is under way. Inside the station a major refurbishment has just been unveiled; immediately outside, a dramatic year-long countdown is nearing its end. And in every aspect of these changes you can savour what was implicit in that smart girl’s observations: the determined division of the railways into the haves and the have-nots, those who travel on Regionali and those who travel on Eurostar, or something even better.
I have described the grandeur of the place, a building with almost twice the cubic volume of the great Gothic Duomo in the centre of the city, but I didn’t get over the deep melancholy of its neglect before 2008. In particular, I remember the black nets strung like funeral drapes from end to end of the huge entrance hall (the so-called Sala delle Carozze) about thirty feet above ground, presumably to prevent pigeons from flying into the vaulted spaces above. Sagging as they gathered filth, these nets robbed the passengers of the exhilarating elevation the original architects had planned, that cathedral feeling that invites you to see a spiritual side t
o every journey. In fact, everything about the station at that time, its cluttered newspaper kiosks and dilapidated prefab sandwich bars, exuded an atmosphere of defeatism. Routine maintenance is never a strong suit for the Italians. They are good at putting on the initial splash, building the building, laying out the roads, arranging the flower beds; they love opening nights and ribbon cutting. But it’s hard to keep the great spectacle fresh and gleaming; its very splendour becomes a burden hardly sustainable on a day-to-day basis, like a romance too wonderful to survive the meaner intercourse of marriage. With a collective shrug, what was a wonderful show is allowed to fall apart. There’s even a sort of grim satisfaction in its debasement. It was too much work. It wasn’t that important. You let grass grow, dust gather, cataracts fall over the eyes. Scurrying back and forth from metro below to train platform above, no one wants to remember the vision when the founding stone was laid, no one wants to be reminded of the intoxicating rhetoric of the unveiling.
Until the day comes when something really has to be done, or when someone has finally managed to come up with the €120 million it’s going to cost. In 2006 they began the long-overdue renovation. The scaffolding went up, large areas of the station disappeared under drapes. Suddenly my favourite sandwich stand and all the staff I’d got to know over so many years were gone. I do hope those people weren’t just fired. For two years we were channelled this way and that between boarded walls and splattered hangings. Some 350,000 people pass through this station every day. It’s a miracle they kept it up and running while completely redesigning the very core of the place, and above all, as we shall see, the movement through it.
In the meantime, the big open piazza outside the station, Piazza Duca d’Aosta, was also being torn up. This is one of those classic urban spaces set aside for anarchy, demonstrations, drunks, football fans, travellers without the price of a hotel, peddlers, pickpockets, prostitutes and drug dealers; a muddle of ill-kept grass, cigarette butts and powerfully unpleasant smells in damp corners. At a push, in daylight and decent weather, it could be OK for a quiet smoke or a sandwich sitting on a low wall, gazing up at the imposing facade of the station with its curious central inscription in letters a yard high: NELL’ANNO MCMXXXI DELL’ERA CRISTIANA (IN THE YEAR 1931 OF THE CHRISTIAN ERA), a sly allusion to the fact that back then the Italians were building a new regime they hoped might last longer than Christendom: the Era Fascista. It was year 9.
Two Gypsy women once tried to mug me in Piazza Duca d’Aosta. Thinking about it later, I couldn’t help but admire their boldness. They converged on me from left and right, each taking an elbow and asking for money while grabbing hold of the shoulder bag I was carrying. I had to shout and thrash about in a most undignified manner. It was after that that I finally resigned myself to using a little Italian backpack to carry my underwear and students’ theses, something I’d always resisted in the past, associating backpacks with schoolchildren and beasts of burden. But they do have the advantage that they’re not easily snatched.
Workmen arrived and started redeveloping the piazza. What this means in Italy today is neutralising it, imposing the well-swept hygiene of large expanses of white paving with occasional steps up and down to assert a rigid, linear geometry. Into this austere mental territory are inserted small, rigorously circumscribed patches of green and even a flower bed or two, nature in its most reduced, unthreatening, controllable form. All of this is functional enough, but it’s hard to be enthusiastic, especially in summer, when the sun beats down and there is no shade in which to eat your sandwich, drink a soda or smoke that cigarette.
Then, quite suddenly, in December 2007, right in front of the station, a monolith had been raised. At least that’s what people started calling it on blogs and in newspapers: Il monolite! Il totem! Sixty towering feet of polished steel, with two convex faces about ten feet across, bearing a legend, high, high up: SEGUI IL CONTO ALLA ROVESCIA. Follow the countdown! To what? ALTA VELOCITÀ came the answer a little further down: HIGH SPEED. Exactly 365 days from the moment the countdown started, a high-speed train would leave Milan for Bologna, covering the 134 miles in just an hour, half the present time. An old photo I have of the monolith shows a giant digital counter in the centre whose glowing red figures, about three floors up, give 237.5.56.11, meaning 237 days, 5 hours, 56 minutes and 11 seconds until the departure of that train, which would then arrive in Bologna exactly 60 minutes later, where another totem had been set up in front of that station, counting down to the orgasmic moment of this miracle train’s punctual arrival.
It takes courage to predict something a whole year ahead in a country where notoriously everything is postponed at the last minute – the deadline for paying your taxes, for submitting your thesis, for applying for a professorship. Looking around you as you cross the sterilised space of the empty piazza and enter the complex building site that the station has become (as I write, work on the metro station approach has been interrupted because the company that won the contract is accused of bribery and corruption), picking your way among the immigrants selling fake designer bags, ducking the little helicopters that Arab vendors launch into the air, avoiding the soap bubbles that two Slav men are squirting from ingenious little machines you wish had been around when you were a kid, averting your gaze, perhaps, from a body under newspapers against a pillar or an ancient woman sitting in her piss selling lapsed pharmaceutical products spread out on a filthy blanket, you can’t help wondering if high-speed rail travel is really society’s most pressing concern right now.
The truth is that every major Italian city rail station – Naples, Rome, Florence, Turin – is a daily challenge to the middle-class commuter’s propensity for denial: will we be able to ignore the spill of humanity leaking into our cosy Italian world from all over the planet? Can we really reassure ourselves that it’s none of our business that these men, women and children wrapped in sacking on the pavement are not our neighbours? Most days, I must say, we rise pretty well to the challenge. We have our iPods, our mobiles. We can walk past the starving to the melodies of Beethoven or the bluster of Bruce Springsteen. Perhaps what has most changed since 2005 are the rising tides of the dispossessed, the unemployed and the unemployable, and the ever more sophisticated technology that helps us not engage with them, to get from A to B faster and faster without touching anything dirty in between.
In this regard, the glittering monolith outside Milano Centrale is definitely on the side of denial. It raises your eye from the feckless press at ground level. ‘High speed bringing people together,’ says a pious promotion, ‘for a more united Italy.’ You can look away from the sprawling bodies and feel virtuous doing so. Only 150 days now. Only 100. We will be able to travel faster and faster – up to 250 miles per hour – in luxury, seeing less and less of the landscape as we shoot by, paying prices high enough to exclude those in need of charity.
Talking about luxury and prices, on the western side of the piazza, the side where the Arabs and Africans hang out, is the five-star Meridien Gallia Hotel, a dozen storeys of pompous 1930s extravagance. Once, my Italian publisher put me up there for the night. What was he thinking of? No sooner was I in my room than a waiter brought a bottle of champagne, courtesy of the house. Looking around, I saw that every luxury was at my fingertips, things I couldn’t even convince myself I wanted, the fluffy slippers, fresh bathrobe, a jacuzzi, polished marble surfaces, linen sheets, quality soaps. I didn’t really feel like champagne but opened the bottle anyway and drank, gazing out through the excellent double glazing of crystal-clean windows to where brown men were kicking a ball back and forth in the shadow of Centrale. I might perfectly well have been watching them on television. Shaking my head, I mimed a toast: to modern insulation.
But the great day was approaching. The first high-speed train was to coincide, more or less, with the opening of the newly renovated station, including a hundred shops, a new ticket hall, specially rebuilt ‘high speed’ platforms and, above all, an entirely new system for moving people t
hrough the station from metro, tram or bus to the platforms high above, and vice versa.
Until that fatal day la mobilità, as Italians call it, worked like this. First you went from the underground metro platform to street level using two escalators, or running up two flights of stairs. Coming out of the metro there were just a few weather-exposed yards before you were safely in the Sala delle Carozze – the carriage hall – a magnificent vaulted and porticoed space where taxis could pick up customers without their having to step out into the rain or sun. Then you passed through any one of a string of impressive, ironwork doors into the grand ticket hall of the station proper, whence you could take two central escalators heading up side by side to a mezzanine floor, then again two more escalators up to another vast hall of kiosks and cafes beyond which, at last, were the platforms themselves, all twenty-two of them, stretching away under an arched glass and iron canopy. Alternatively, you could choose the broad granite staircases at the left and right extremities of the ticket hall.
Why, you wonder, would anyone choose those stairs when we’re talking about climbing the equivalent of three floors in a regular house, having already climbed two to get out of the metro?
Here we have to mention an Italian trait that appears to be deeply ingrained in the national psyche: Italians do not walk on escalators and only rarely stand to one side to allow others to walk. In the main metropolises of the United Kingdom, Germany and the United States, people who don’t want to climb an escalator will stand to the right so that those in a hurry can scuttle by on their left. Rather than encumber the fast lane, they will place their bags on the step above or below them. This is extremely considerate and civilised of them.
Italians do not do this. Not because they are inconsiderate, but because it doesn’t occur to them. An Italian all alone on a broad, long modern escalator will stand to left or right as he or she chooses and invariably place his or her large suitcase on the same step, entirely blocking any swift passage up or down the escalator. Desperate, on one occasion, to get by the only two people on the up escalator at Stazione Centrale – the departure of my train already long announced – I was told by an only slightly irritated voice that if I wanted to rush madly around I really should have used the stairs, shouldn’t I, which are so much wider. They were a mild, middle-aged couple with Tuscan accents. They did not budge. When I pointed out that since the escalator had the advantage of moving upwards while the stairs notoriously stayed put, to rush up the escalator was faster than to rush up the stairs, the man observed that the escalator was set in motion precisely to save passengers the effort of climbing from one level to another. It was as if, as far as he was concerned, once one stepped onto an escalator the body naturally, instinctively reacted by assuming a position of rest and any other behaviour was perverse.