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  At the same time, the railways have traditionally been used as an organisation to absorb excess labour and keep unemployment down. ‘What a lot of officials!’ wrote D. H. Lawrence on the station in Messina, Sicily, in 1920. ‘You know them by their caps. Elegant tubby little officials in kid-and-patent boots and gold-laced caps, tall long nosed ones in more gold-laced caps, like angels in and out of the gates of heaven they thread in and out of the various doors.’

  Having shed a hundred thousand staff in the past twenty years, Trenitalia is no longer so dramatically overmanned but still employs far more personnel per mile travelled than France, Germany or Britain. Ten thousand of the ninety-nine thousand rail workers are considered unnecessary. And the officials still have smart caps with gold bands, and shiny buttons on their dark jackets.

  Returning from Venice one evening to the tiny station of Verona Porta Vescovo, I discovered that the doors would not open. On the Interregionale there is a red handle you pull upwards when the train stops. The door should slide open. One passenger after another yanked and tugged. Imprecation, blasphemy. Since there were platforms on both sides of the train, they yanked and tugged on both sides. Just as the train began to move off, a door jerked open and a handful of passengers spilled out.

  At which point, still congratulating ourselves on our close shave, we were yelled at by a man with a wonderfully peaked cap, a cap far larger and rounder and above all redder than seemed necessary. It was the cap of the capostazione, the stationmaster. Someone explained why we had got off when the train was already in motion, which of course is strictly forbidden. ‘Non esiste!’ the important man protested. It wasn’t possible that the doors wouldn’t open. We must have done something wrong. Various passengers corroborated the story. ‘Non esiste!’ he insisted. It can’t be. Perhaps to work for Trenitalia sometimes requires living in denial.

  For example, it’s clear that if ticket prices are to be low (less than half the prices on Deutschebahn, less than a third of British railway companies) and manning high, the train service will be expensive to run. How can a country with a national debt running at more than 100 per cent of GNP deal with this? One answer is: il supplemento.

  If to take an Interregionale to Milan costs €6.82, to take the faster Intercity costs €11.05, or rather the base ticket of €6.82 plus a supplement of €4.23; the even faster (just) Eurostar will cost a further 50 cents. Once upon a time the supplement formed only a small percentage of the ticket, but since basic rail fares are taken into account to calculate national inflation rates, while Intercity rail fares are not, or not until recently, the supplement has tended to grow in relation to the basic ticket. A great deal of inflation can be hidden with such ruses. But what do you get for this extra money? The Interregionale takes fourteen minutes longer than the Intercity and twenty-four minutes longer than the Eurostar. Do I value fourteen minutes of my time at €4.23?

  It’s more complicated than that.

  To encourage people to pay the higher fare, the Interregionali tend to disappear for certain periods of the day, especially if you’re making a long trip. On the other hand, following a logic that runs exactly contrary to notions of supply and demand, if you travel with the living dead, as I am often obliged to, the only trains will be Interregionali, to cater to the poorer commuters, the damned, those who could not, on a daily basis, pay the higher fare, all this thanks to that rather pious though always welcome Italian commitment to a certain kind of popular socialism (of which needless to say both Catholicism and Fascism are close relatives). The more demand, then, the lower the fare.

  So we have the 6.40 Verona–Genova Interregionale in the morning and the terrifying 18.15 Milano–Venezia Interregionale in the evening. Curiously, these humdrum overcrowded commuter convoys with their cheaper tickets travelling at peak times are the most reliable and the most punctual. Covering 100 miles in two hours with a locomotive and rolling stock capable of 110 miles an hour, they have time to play with.

  SO ON THE FIRST day of the new academic year I buy my annual season ticket to Milan. There is no special window. You stand in the queue with everyone else. Four windows are manned, six are not. Fortunately, they recently introduced a single queuing system at Verona Porta Nuova, a long winding snake between rope barriers, this to avoid those frustrating situations where you choose the wrong queue and find yourself stuck for hours. We all welcomed this sign of progress and civilisation. The ropes were a smart white and red swinging from bright chrome posts; but having set up the snake, they failed to block entry to the windows to people who had not queued up, people entering at what was supposed to be the exit.

  A man leans against a pillar, chewing gum, watching, waiting, then, just as a window becomes free, he strides rapidly towards it and pushes in. The ticket seller knows what has happened but does not protest. The people in the queue grumble but don’t actually intervene. This has always surprised me in Italy, the general resignation in the face of the furbo, the sly one. It is always worth trying it on here. If things get unpleasant, you can protest that you didn’t understand the rules.

  A notice tells you that you’re not supposed to ask for information at the ticket window, just buy your ticket and go, but people are asking for the most detailed information. ‘How much would it cost to switch from second to first class on an overnight train to Lecce with four people taking into account reductions for the family and the granny over seventy?’

  The ticket sellers are patient. They don’t have a train to catch. Perhaps they like giving out information, they like demonstrating knowledge and expertise. At the place where the official queue emerges from its serpent of ropes, the point where you’re getting close to your turn, you’ll find it’s impossible to see the ticket window furthest to the left, because it’s hidden behind a pillar clad (for the World Cup) in a highly polished chocolaty-brown stone. This hidden window, I’ve noticed, is always in use, whereas those directly opposite the queue, and hence highly visible, are frequently closed. If you don’t know that the window behind the pillar is there, you don’t go to it. And the ticket seller doesn’t call to you. He has no buzzers to push, no warning lights to attract his customers. Trenitalia does not want to spoil us.

  At the window to my right, someone is asking for the timetable for a complicated series of connections to a town in Liguria. The queue frets. ‘On which trains can I take my bicycle?’ he asks. Another furbo manages to sneak in when the window near the exit is momentarily free. This time the ticket seller protests, but half-heartedly. ‘I’ll be quick,’ il furbo says. ‘Otherwise I’ll miss my train.’

  Nobody shouts. There is a slow, simmering resentment, as if the people who have behaved properly are grimly pleased to get confirmation that good citizenship is always futile, a kind of martyrdom. This is an important Italian emotion: I am behaving well and suffering because of that. I am a martyr. Mi sto sacrificando. It is a feeling that will justify some bad behaviour at the appropriate moment.

  Do these people really need to ask for so much information at the ticket windows? No. There are excellent poster-size timetables showing all departures from the station. The Italians are good at this. There are cheap, comprehensive and just about comprehensible national timetables available at the station’s newsagent. They give you all the trains in northern Italy for a six-month period. There is an information office. For some reason the information office is at the other end of the station, perhaps fifty yards from the ticket windows – you have to walk down a long, elegantly paved corridor – and the timetables are not displayed near the ticket queue. This seems to be true in every station in Italy. It’s strange. You cannot consult train times while waiting in the queue, which might be exactly when you want to consult them. Of course you hurry to the queue without looking at the timetable, because you fear that if you don’t, you’ll lose your place and miss your train, but then at the window you have to ask for information. At one window a ticket seller patiently starts to explain the advantages and limitations of a comp
lex promotional offer. The PA system announces the trains about to leave.

  TO COPE WITH THIS stressful situation Trenitalia introduced the SportelloVeloce or FastTicket, as it’s also called. (Theses could be written about this habit of offering a translation that is not really a translation but as it were an Italian fantasy of how English works directed more at an Italian public, as a marketing operation, than at an English-speaking public on the move.) This is a window that you’re only supposed to use if your train departs within the next fifteen minutes. Sensibly, they placed the SportelloVeloce in the position where people usually sneak in to beat the main queue in its long snake between red ropes and chrome bars.

  But what if my train leaves in half an hour? I stand in the queue for fifteen minutes, I see things are getting tight. Do I switch to the fast queue, where there are already four people? What if one of them asks for information? What if everybody decides that they can now arrive only fifteen minutes before the train leaves and use the fast queue? This would be a problem, because whereas at least two of the main windows are always open, the FastTicket window is frequently closed.

  Or what if I queue at the SportelloVeloce twenty-five minutes before my train leaves but get to the ticket seller eighteen minutes before it leaves? Will he serve me? Probably yes, but he would be within his rights not to. Immigrants, in particular, tend to get turned away. I mean non-whites. And sometimes tourists. Foreign tourists. So do I have to go to the back of the queue? Can I keep him arguing for three minutes, at which point he would no longer be able to deny me a ticket? Unless perhaps my train is suddenly signalled as delayed for half an hour. Not an unusual occurrence. Or, since a standard rail ticket is valid for two months, what if I say I’m getting the Intercity to Bolzano leaving in five minutes, when in fact I’m planning to get it in two weeks? Is anybody going to check that I actually board today’s train? These are unanswered questions. FastTicket has not made ticket buying easier. A child could see this. So why was it introduced? The time has come to talk about image.

  Use of English is always a clue. Readers will have noticed that only the slow trains now have Italian names, the Interregionale and, slower still, crawling doggedly from one watering hole to the next, the Regionale. These are the trains that need not be presented to the outside world, to the foreign businessman and the credit-card-holding tourist. The rolling stock is old and rattly. In summer you roast and in winter you freeze. The seats are narrow and hard, the cleaning … well, best take a deep breath before passing the toilet. But as soon as you start paying supplements you are in the territory of English, or at least international-speak. The proud old categories of Espresso, Rapido and Super-Rapido have largely disappeared. Now we have the Intercity, the Eurocity and the Eurostar.

  What we are dealing with here is an ongoing Italian dilemma. Are we ‘part of Europe’ or not? Are we part of the modern world? Are we progressive or backward? Above all, are we serious? There is a general perception that the Italian way of doing things, particularly in the public sector, is sloppy and slow, compromised by special interests and political considerations; hence an enormous effort must be made to work against the Latin grain and emulate a Teutonic punctuality, an Anglo-French high-tech.

  This unease goes right back to the making of the Italian state. It is there in the patriot D’Azeglio’s famous line, ‘We have made Italy, now we must make the Italians.’ It is there in Mussolini’s obsession that ‘our way of eating, dressing, working and sleeping, the whole complex of our daily habits, must be reformed’. To make the trains run on time would be proof that Fascism had achieved this, that a profound change had occurred in the national psyche. ‘Abassa la vita commoda!’ proclaimed one Fascist slogan. Down with the easy life! You can understand why elections could hardly be free and fair when the main political party was fielding slogans like that.

  But at another level, and quite understandably, Italians have no desire at all to change. They like an easy life. They consider themselves superior to those crude and fretful nations who put punctuality before style and comfortable digestion. A compromise is sought in image. Italy will be made to look fast and modern. There will be FastTicket windows even if they make the process of buying tickets more complex and anxiety-ridden than before. At the main station in Milan a member of the railway staff has now been given the task of vetting those who stand in the queue at the SportelloVeloce. ‘What train are you getting, signore? When does it leave?’ But how do we know if the reply a passenger gives to this official is the same as the request he will make at the ticket window? A problem of overmanning is solved, a new job invented, but the gap for the furbo remains open.

  SUDDENLY I BECOME AWARE that there is a man sitting at one of the five ticket windows that was previously closed. A man in uniform. I’m second in the queue now. The man sits there quietly, unobtrusively. He has just started his shift. He looks at the queue where people are anxiously focused on the windows that are busy. He scratches an unshaven neck and turns the pink pages of his Gazzetta dello Sport. He is not shirking work, but he is not inviting it either. He has reading material.

  I nudge the man in front: ‘That window’s free.’ He looks at me suspiciously, as if I were trying to get him out of the way to grab the next free window. ‘Are you open?’ he calls before committing himself. The man raises his eyes to gesture to the electronic display at the top of his window. ‘It says open, doesn’t it?’ As a result, just a few minutes later, I find myself going to the window hidden behind the pillar, where I discover that my one-time neighbour Beppe is serving.

  Fifteen years ago Beppe gave up a promising and remunerative life as a freelance electrician to take up the dull job of serving at the ticket windows in Verona Porta Nuova. He had applied for the job when temporarily unemployed some years before; he survived a long and complex admissions process and served his time on a waiting list of some scores of men and women. When, years later, the call finally came, it was an opportunity his wife and parents wouldn’t let him pass up: a meal ticket for life. This is how a railway job is seen. It is decently paid and as irreversible as a place in paradise. In the 1960s there was even the suggestion that railway jobs should be made hereditary, a return to the medieval estates. This might seem laughable, but when most Italians in prominent positions seem to be the children of others in similar positions, when the multitude of small family companies that make up the most dynamic part of the Italian economy are generally passed on from father to son, or indeed daughter at a pinch, one can understand why the unions felt this arrangement could be introduced for an elite group of workers like the railway men.

  Another friend of mine, a young man who once specialised in making handmade harpsichords, gave up his little workshop to become a railway carpenter repairing vandalised carriage fittings. Peer pressure to make these sad decisions is considerable. Job security is placed beyond every other consideration. Beppe, I know, finds his work at the ticket window desperately tedious but hangs on with bovine good humour. ‘These are hard times,’ he says, though one of the hardest things these days is finding an electrician in a hurry. Handmade harpsichords are not widely available either.

  ‘An annual season ticket to Milan,’ I tell him.

  ‘Interregionale, Intercity or Eurostar?’ Beppe asks.

  I explain that I take the Interregionale going but as often as not an Intercity coming back.

  My old neighbour shakes his head, rubs his chin in his hand. ‘Complicated.’

  In the early 1990s, as part of an urgent effort to make the railways lean and mean, or at least not quite so bonnie and bountiful, the Ferrovie dello Stato (FS) were officially split off from government control and obliged to return, if not a profit, then certainly not much of a loss. However, since the government continued to own more than half the company’s shares and to regulate every aspect of company policy, stipulating what lines it was obliged to run with what regularity and at what fares, the move was little more than, well, a formality. Then in the late nineties,
to fall in line with European legislation on competition in the transport sector, the monolithic company was split up into various smaller companies under the umbrella holding of the FS; so the Rete Ferroviaria Italiana (Italian Railway Network) would run the lines and the smaller stations, while Grandi Stazioni would run the bigger stations and Trenitalia would run the trains.

  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.