Entries about trains

When I was in Year 3 of primary school my class studied Pompeii. I was spellbound by the descriptions of the Mount Vesuvius volcano raining fire and ash on a city, burying the entire town and its unfortunate inhabitants beneath tens of metres of cinders, only to be unearthed perfectly preserved eighteen centuries later.

Learning about Pompeii at school awoke within me a lifelong fascination with volcanoes. I guess I have always been interested in things that I can’t see in Australia and Australia, occupying the most geologically stable continent on earth in the middle of a tectonic plate, doesn’t have active volcanoes.

I was determined to visit Pompeii one day. Thirty-three years later, I made it. Better late than never.

First, I had to get there. Pompeii is two hundred and forty kilometres southeast of Rome. In Australia, with its poor roads and slow, infrequent trains, this distance would most likely be outside day-tripping radius. Thankfully Italy is much better endowed with transport infrastructure.

Thus on the morning of Tuesday 12 November 2019 I emerged from the Empire Suites in the grim, damp dawn twilight, took the Line A metro to Roma Termini railway station and grabbed coffee and a pastry for breakfast at a station café near the platform entrance. Italian coffee culture is unusual from an Australian perspective. The coffee is excellent – Australians have learned well from their Italian maestros – but typically a customer will buy a coffee from the café, stand at the counter, wolf the coffee down in one gulp then go on their merry way. Judging by what I saw in Rome, coffee doesn’t seem to be quite the social thing as it is in Australia where the lingering mid-morning “coffee run” with colleagues and chatting up the cute barista have been elevated to a treasured ritual.

I showed my €36.50 Trenitalia ticket on my phone to the Trenitalia employee who let me through the gate and waited a short while for the sleek, long, red Frecciarossa high-speed train to arrive from Florence. Frecciarossa is Italian for “Red Arrow” and is the fastest of the three types of high-speed train operated by the government-owned Trenitalia.

After enduring another very Italian scrum of people trying to get on forcing their way against people trying to get off (God damn it, Italy!), I settled into my very comfortable window seat in a Standard class carriage and the train departed on time at 07:55. After a few kilometres of negotiating its way through the congested tracks around Roma Termini the Frecciarossa then found itself on the dedicated high-speed line southeast towards Naples.

The train rocketed across the fertile plains of Lazio and Campania at three hundred kilometres an hour, farms and villages little more than a blur. I experienced quite a bit of cognitive dissonance – how on earth does a nation as disorganised, corrupt and fractious as Italy manage to have such awesome railways? I asked my Italian colleague when I returned home, he told me that the Italian railways are secretly run by the Germans. I don’t think he was lying. It is the only explanation that could make any possible sense.

After about an hour the train entered Naples’ suburbs. My heart sank. I wasn’t in the First World any more. This was Dhaka or Lagos or Caracas or Manila. The dreary landscape was studded with grotty high-rise apartment buildings of the most appalling decrepitude. Every conceivable surface that could possibly be reached by human hands, and even many surfaces that couldn’t, was covered in the most vile graffiti. Some of the graffiti was in places that made me think the only way the vandals could get there was by helicopter. The slummy houses looked as if they were ready to collapse. The filthy narrow streets were congested with the most disorderly traffic. I thanked my lucky stars that my stay in Naples would only be brief.

The train arrived at Napoli Centrale station on time after its 220-kilometre journey from Rome that took only seventy minutes. I navigated through the buzzing station concourse trying to find the Circumvesuviana platforms, but of course all the signage was contradictory with a sign telling me to go one way right next to another sign telling me to go the other way. (God damn it, Italy!)

I found the Circumvesuviana platforms confusingly called Napoli Garibaldi station even though it is part of the Napoli Centrale station complex. I bought my magnetic-stripe ticket to Pompei Scavi-Villa dei Misteri station and walked down the stairs to the platforms. I had entered the very portal of hell itself. The station had all the charm of an underground car park, smelled like a public toilet and the trains, each and every one of them, were entirely covered in graffiti. A nasty old man who objected to me photographing the trains gave me the finger. Charming.

My Circumvesuviana train arrived after a twenty-minute wait and I boarded the noisy, rattly old thing. Circumvesuviana is a system of suburban rail lines serving the Naples metropolitan area running on a network of narrow-gauge tracks that are separate to the Trenitalia railway network; most lines run at thirty-minute intervals. As the name suggests, the lines form a ring around Mount Vesuvius.

The crowded train with cramped, uncomfortable plastic seats slowly emptied as it stopped at every station through Naples’ southeastern suburbs on the plains at the foot of Mount Vesuvius. Thankfully the train soon arrived at Pompei Scavi-Villa dei Misteri and it was with considerable gratitude that I disembarked.

The entrance to the ruins of ancient Pompeii is right next to the station. I bought my entrance ticket, hired an audio guide and entered through the Porta Marina, the old city gate on the road to the old harbour which was nearby.

The next six hours saw me stumbling around one of the most magnificent places I have ever visited, my jaw scraping the two-thousand-year-old cobblestones as it dropped in amazement. I found myself involuntarily squealing with delight as I found yet another pristine mosaic or crisp mural or antique snack bar counter that looked like it was installed yesterday.

Pompeii is laid out like many Ancient Roman cities. There is a broad main street running roughly east-west, another prominent street running roughly north-south, and the two intersect at the Forum, a major square that was the commercial and governmental heart of the town. Running off the two main streets is a dense grid of narrower streets meeting at crisp right angles; the regularity of Pompeii’s grid meant I never got lost.

On the Forum with its pillared Basilica and temple to Jupiter is an open-sided shed with a display of artifacts unearthed by archaeologists. Among these finds are plaster casts. The bodies of humans and animals were buried by the ash and rock. The volcanic debris solidified around the corpses. The bodies slowly decomposed leaving a void in the compressed cinders in the shape of the body. Archaeologists pour plaster into these cavities as they find them and carefully chip away the volcanic matter to reveal a perfect impression of the dead person or animal. The most famous of these casts is the “Mule Driver”, crouched in agony, his hands feebly covering his face. Even more haunting is the cast of a child rigidly lying flat on its side with their arms clutched around their chest. There is also a dog lying on its back, its wide collar plainly visible, its four legs contorted as if trying to push the falling cinders away.

Just north of the old town outside the city walls is the Villa of Mysteries. This sprawling residence belonging to a patrician family has more courtyards, gardens, mosaics, saucy murals and servants’ quarters than I could care to count. It is much better preserved than most of the houses in town – the roof seems to have been spared collapse – and seems just as inhabitable now as it was back then.

I ambled around the streets in awe for far longer than I had anticipated. At regular intervals on the main streets were zebra crossings. Yes, the Roman Empire had zebra crossings. Ancient Roman kerbs were quite high – I would guess at least thirty centimetres if not higher – which made crossing the street quite dangerous. Never mind – the municipal authorities two thousand years ago installed stones shaped like zebra crossings, the tops of the stones flush with the height of the kerb; the gaps between the stones allowed carts to pass through the crossing unhindered. Genius.

There were houses for the rich with their mosaics and gardens and fountains, houses for the poor with their narrow frontages and small closet-like bedrooms. There was a brothel, its interior walls above the doors to the working rooms daubed with murals showing all the different positions customers could point at and order from the girls, rather like a McDonald’s menu. There were the thermopolia, snack bars with counters facing the street where hot food was served from pots recessed in the tiled counters. I could just imagine it – lentil stew, olives in red wine sauce, barley soup – drool! The Pompeii park authorities could do no better job than to bring these thermopolia back into service; the “restaurant” at Pompeii is expensive and disgusting. You would think I would learn by now to bring my own food when visiting tourist sites like this.

There was a bakery with its millstones and kneading benches and ovens, there were the public baths with its changing rooms and elaborate water heating systems, there was the macellum meat market with its stallholder booths facing onto the quadrangle. There was the amphitheatre where gladiators fought and Pink Floyd once performed, there was the theatre where Pompeiians were entertained, there was the palestra where athletes trained and competed, there were temples to this ancient god or that, there was a vineyard where a heirloom variety of grape is grown to make wine using the same methods as two millennia ago.

There is also so much yet to be discovered – only about two-thirds of the town has been excavated. The rest is still buried and will most likely remain so. Park authorities are fighting a never-ending battle against decay. The bits of Pompeii that have been unearthed are now exposed to the elements and are falling apart; many sites are closed to the public due to conservation works.

My plan for the day was to spend a couple of hours at Pompeii then somehow find my way to the top of Mount Vesuvius by bus or taxi, walk around the crater, then return to Naples in time for the train back to Rome. However, Pompeii was so interesting, so stimulating, so indescribably enthralling that I couldn’t leave. On every cobbled alley there was some sight that contrived to keep me lingering in Pompeii just a little bit longer.

The park closed around sunset at five o’clock. I left Pompeii grateful that I had been given the opportunity to see one of the greatest historic sites in the world, a snapshot of life as it was in a provincial town of one of the planet’s greatest empires of all time twenty centuries ago. My memories of Pompeii will be a source of delight the rest of my life.

I went back to Naples on yet another crummy, slightly nauseating Circumvesuviana train. I got to Napoli Centrale station at about six o’clock with ninety minutes to spare until my train back to Rome. I didn’t really feel like hanging around a railway station for ninety minutes so I got out my Lonely Planet, turned to the page with a map of the Naples city centre and started walking across the giant, windswept Piazza Garibaldi into the old town.

The route I chose was a rough triangle through the neighbourhood west of the station as far as the cathedral and back. I was slightly nervous – I had read too many horror stories about Naples, the thieves on Vespas who cut backpacks away from tourists with machetes at high speed, the giant piles of uncollected garbage, the rough quarters ruled by the Camorra organised crime families with an iron fist. I needn’t have worried too much.

Yes, I found myself in some of the filthiest, most disgusting neighbourhoods I have ever seen in the developed world. The grimy narrow streets were almost impassable due to the logjam of cars and motorbikes and scooters and delivery vans, the merchants whose wares encroached metres out the front of their shops, the disorderly crowds and the rancid bulging bags of rubbish.

But the diamonds I found in the Neapolitan rough! Laundry hung on lines strung between windows across the streets – just like in every movie I’ve ever seen set in Italy. It’s not just a stereotype! Six-year-old boys were kicking a football in the street completely unsupervised, their talents leaving me in no doubt that they will win the World Cup for the Azzurri in 2042. How many places are there in the Western world where kids can still kick ball in the street without anxious parents watching their every move? You can’t throw a brick without hitting a pizzeria in this city which is the birthplace of pizza. Everything you have heard about Neapolitan pizza being the greatest is true – and only two euros the slice, a rather large slice too. Carts sold freshly baked pastries of the most delectable sweetness for one euro each. A raven-haired lass of about twenty years and the most stunning beauty pulled up beside me on her Vespa. She shouted into the shop next to where I was walking. “Angela! Angela! Zia Angela!” Her black-smocked aunt came rushing out of the shop and they embraced as if they hadn’t seen each other in a decade.

Naples is dismal, decaying, disorderly. But what life! What zest! The streets are abuzz with community, with family, with belonging, with passion. Who can truly say they have been alive if they have not yet been to Naples?

I wished that I had allotted myself more time to explore Naples – it seemed far more lively and authentically Italian than Rome and the energy of the place was nothing short of contagious. Unfortunately, time was fleeing and I needed to go and catch my train.

My Frecciarossa trip back to Roma Termini was just as efficient and uneventful as my morning southbound journey. Soon after getting off the train I had to go to the toilet. It was that dreaded time once again – I had to go to battle with that most repulsive of species, Bitchius maxmius, the common lesser spotted European toilet attendant.

I found the poorly-signed public toilet in some remote corner of the gargantuan station. Bitchius maximus was not at her little counter with the coin tray; she was just a couple of metres inside the entrance talking to some other customer. By this time I was rather desperate. “Buona sera? Hello? Umm … spiacente? Ho bisogno to go to the toilet … like, now? As in, right now? Hello? Ciao? Can you hear me?”

Bitchius maximus didn’t even respond. I waited as long as I could and called louder but she didn’t even blink. I needed to go. Desperate times call for desperate measures – I decided to go into the toilet and pay after I did my business. So I walked into the male toilet cubicle and locked the door.

World War III broke out. Bitchius maximus suddenly deigned to notice my presence. Fancy that! There was banging and kicking against the door and shouting and all sorts of cursing in rapid-fire Italian. I had no idea that such a small, demented old woman was capable of such furious strength.

I don’t understand European toilets. Every single one of them is staffed full-time by some hideous crone to whom you pay good money for the right to use yet every single one of them is disgraceful. The seat was missing. There was no soap. The hand dryer didn’t work. The toilet hadn’t been cleaned since Mussolini was Italy’s leader. I don’t know about you but if my full-time job were to oversee a public toilet the place would be so clean you’d be able to eat dinner off the floor. It’s not like the duties would be that complicated – collect cash from customers, clean and tidy up when things are quiet. Hardly the most taxing of jobs.

I took my sweet time just to make Bitchius maximus even more riled up then I finally emerged and with a smile on my face placed a one-euro coin in her stupid little tray. “I did try to get your attention, you stupid old cow, but you ignored me! I was going to pay, you mad f#$%ing bitch, no need to get your knickers in a knot. Go to hell, you miserable old w#$%e!” I shouted at her in English. I walked away and the lunatic was still shouting at me. I’m being honest – nothing makes me more proud to be Australian than our toilets. They are free, they are usually clean, they don’t have some psychopathic hag hanging around them making your life a misery. Aussie Aussie Aussie! Oi oi oi!

The Mule Driver

Vineyard at Pompeii

Floor mosaic in the house of a wealthy Pompeii family

Theatre at Pompeii

Amphitheatre at Pompeii

Gladiator fight advertising in Latin in Pompeii

Pompeii Forum, the town's main square

Street in Pompeii

Animal mural in Pompeii house

Changing room at the Stabian Baths in Pompeii

Plaster cast of dog killed by eruption of Mt Vesuvius in Pompeii

My train to Rome was not due to leave Firenze Santa Maria Novella station until 12:17 on Saturday the tenth of November 2019 so I had plenty of time to squeeze in some more Florence sights before I left.

Or so I thought.

I was silly, I thought seeing things would be as simple as rocking up to the venue in question, waiting a short while in a queue, buying a ticket and going in. Hardy har har. Combine the dysfunctional organisational skills of Italians with the insane numbers of tourists that would put even the famous efficiency of the Swiss or the Japanese under unbearable strain and you have the recipe for hordes of disappointed visitors who should have been smarter and bought their tickets online.

First, I tried the Palazzo Vecchio, the fourteenth-century castle-like building that was the administrative centre of the Republic of Florence. Apart from the magnificent apartments of the Medici clan, the chapels and the banquet halls, the Palazzo also has a reputed art gallery. I eagerly joined the long queue. After several minutes I realised the queue was not moving. I thought that perhaps the Palazzo was not yet open, but I peered over the shoulders of people in front of me and the ticket counters were indeed open, it’s just that the staff were so slow and inefficient that the queue never moved.

I decided to give the Palazzo Vecchio the flick and head to a nearby church, the Orsanmichele Church. The front door of this significant fourteenth-century place of worship was open. Yay! So I went in, but couldn’t go any further than a couple of metres because the church was closed for renovations. Bugger. At least I got a few glimpses of the stained glass windows and the back of the splendidly Gothic tabernacle.

After having no luck getting into the Duomo the day before, I thought I might have a better shot today. But of course, it was Sunday! And the Duomo is a cathedral. Which means it is a church. Which means that people use that church for worship. The Duomo was closed to the public all day for what appeared to be a never-ending succession of Masses, as were the Basilicas of San Lorenzo and Santa Maria Novella.

There was one sight I managed to experience before catching my train – the Mercato Centrale (Central Market). This is a two-storey affair, not especially historic (I am guessing it was built in the late nineteenth century) but attractive enough. The bottom floor is Florence’s wholesale produce market. Being a Sunday this section was closed but it was just the same grotty collection of forklifts, pallets, carboard boxes and the overpowering stench of rotten cabbage that you find in wholesale produce markets all over the world. Upstairs was open though, and what a great place it was! There were rows of fancy food shops – delicatessens, butchers, gelaterias, wine bars, cheese shops – underneath an impressive glass canopy.

The Mercato Centrale was a foodie’s paradise and I regretted that I had already eaten a distinctly crappy breakfast at yet another rip-off restaurant. I had enough space in my stomach for a cannolo though. Cannoli are reasonably common at cake shops in Australia, a doner kebab-like roll of pastry with a sweet cream filling, but the cannoli I have had back home cannot compare to the one I had at the Mercato Centrale. The dusting of crushed pistachios made what was already a superior cannolo simply divine.

Time was fleeing so I went back to Tina’s apartment, fetched my backpack from my room, exchanged heart-felt farewells with Tina, and hauled my pack the short distance to Firenze Santa Maria Novella station.

I didn’t have to wait too long until my train appeared. There are two companies that run high-speed rail services in Italy – the government-owned Trenitalia with its Frecce services, and the privately-owned Italo. My Italo train, a sleek, stylish thing the colour of Sangiovese wine, glided silently into the platform, came to a stop, and I waited while a scrum of people trying to get on were pushing against plenty of other people were trying to get off. God damn it, Italy!

I finally settled into my seat in the Prima ambience. Italo trains don’t have classes like normal trains, but ambiences. The marketing guff is that no ambience is better than one another, they are just different, and passengers get to choose which ambience suits them the best. It just so happens that some ambiences are more expensive and have more room than other ambiences – in descending price order, Club, Prima, Comfort and Smart. It’s a load of advertising industry bullshit if you ask me.

Despite the cringeworthy wankery of Italo’s “ambiences”, it was an awesome train. The service was great, the carriage was antiseptically clean, the seat was comfortable, the Wi-Fi, USB ports and power points were greatly appreciated. An attendant came around with a trolley and served a free and entirely creditable cup of espresso coffee with an apricot pastry as I watched the scruffy Tuscan countryside speed past at 250 kilometres per hour.

The Italo train arrived at Roma Termini on time at 13:50, only ninety-three minutes after leaving Florence. Roma Termini is not the most pleasant station I have ever seen, but it is enormous and rather dizzying. In terms of size, its bland glassy modernist architecture and the kinds of retail and fast food outlets that clog all the corridors, it reminds me more of an international airport than a railway station. It took me forever to find the Rome Metro platforms.

I finally found my Line A platforms – the signage in Roma Termini was nothing short of appalling – I bought a weekly Rome public transport ticket and I boarded my dirty, crowded metro train for my six-station trip to Ottaviano. I know it was very early in my stay in Rome but I disliked the city already. There was a harshness of manner among the people I encountered at Roma Termini and on the metro that I found a little disquieting. It seemed as if many people had a chip on their shoulder, a hardness in their eyes, like they were just waiting for the opportunity for someone to look at them the wrong way so they could punch them. The clashing scrums of people trying to get on and off the train at the same time at the various stations seemed like further evidence that Rome wasn’t going to be a nice city.

I basically had to fight my way off the train at Ottaviano. I emerged from the grim, dim, brown metro station onto the street above. This neighbourhood wasn’t too bad. Prati is an affluent suburb of neat late nineteenth-century apartment buildings on broad tree-lined avenues; this neighbourhood was built to house all the public servants who moved to Rome when it became the capital of the unified Kingdom of Italy after the Risorgimento. Prati seemed in a way more Parisian than Roman.

I found my hotel – a large apartment divided into about five hotel rooms, really – called the Empire Suites. The elderly owner greeted me like a long-lost friend. Perhaps I was wrong in my first impression of Rome.

“My-a son, he-a leeve in Ow-strah-lia,” he said.

This happens a lot in Italy. Every man and his dog has a close relative who lives in Ow-strah-lia. “Wow, that’s nice.”

“He-a leeve in Seedanee. Where in Ow-strah-lia you leeve?”

“I’m from Sydney too.”

“My-a son, he-a leeve in Manly. You-a know heem?”

I didn’t have the heart to tell him that Sydney has over five million people, a population greater than even Rome’s, and that unfortunately I had yet to make acquaintance with each and every Sydneysider. “No, sorry, I don’t know him. Manly is very nice though. It’s expensive. It has a very nice beach. Lots of pine trees along the beach.”

He seemed pleased that his son had made enough of a success of himself to live in such an agreeable and wealthy suburb.

After checking in and dumping my backpack in my room I went for a walk. It was fairly late in the afternoon on a Sunday, I wouldn’t be able to explore any museum or major sight. I decided to indulge in my love of geography instead.

The Empire Suites was a fifteen-minute walk from the State of Vatican City, the world’s smallest country. There aren’t many countries where you can walk around the entire country in a leisurely ninety-minute stroll. I had yet to walk around any country. I was determined to change this.

I started at the north-eastern corner of Vatican City and walked clockwise around the country. The country is only forty-nine hectares, about twice the size of Australia’s largest shopping centre. The border is quite easy to follow, the vast majority of it consists of a very high brick wall enclosing the church property within – the Apostolic Palace, St Peter’s Basilica, the Vatican Gardens, the Pope’s personal railway station and heliport.

Many people think the State of Vatican City is ancient, as old as the Roman Catholic Church itself. In reality it is a twentieth-century invention. For over a millennium the Pope was not only the spiritual head of the Catholic Church but also the ruler of the Papal States which covered most of central Italy. When Garibaldi and his troops invaded the Papal States in 1870 and reunified Italy in the Risorgimento the Pope refused to recognise the new Italian kingdom. A succession of Popes for six decades refused to leave the church’s headquarters on the Vatican Hill – they described themselves as “prisoners of the Vatican”.

In 1929 the Pope and Italy’s dictator Benito Mussolini came to an agreement, the Lateran Treaty. In return for the Pope recognising Italian sovereignty, the Catholic Church would have its own sovereign state, the State of Vatican City, which would likewise be recognised by Italy. This sovereign state, as miniscule as it is, would at least allow the Holy See to conduct diplomatic relations with other countries and provide a secular base from which to manage the entire Catholic Church worldwide, just as the old Papal States did. It is no coincidence that Vatican City has the same flag as the erstwhile Papal States.

After one and a half hours and four kilometres I completed my circumnavigation of Vatican City. Hooray! How many countries have you walked around the entire circumference? I’ve walked around a whole country and you haven’t. So nur nurny nur nur.

The sun was setting and I decided to explore some of Rome’s public transport system. It’s not very good. To be honest, most Australian cities have better public transport than Rome, which is a rather unusual thing to say about a European city. Only a small part of the Rome metropolitan area is covered by the three-line metro system, the trams are dirty and ancient and also only cover a very small part of the urban area, the buses are infrequent and difficult to navigate, signage is abysmal and transport services are often so crowded you can’t get on board.

I caught a route 19 tram from Piazza del Risorgimento to the Policlinico hospital on Rome’s eastern side. Route 19 travels in a long arc from just outside Vatican City in the west through Rome’s northern suburbs and then out to the east. The tram was battered, filthy, ugly, slow, rattly, draughty and uncomfortable.

After what seemed an eternity I alighted at the tram stop at Policlinico. The tram stop was a narrow platform squeezed between the tram tracks and the traffic lanes of a busy arterial road. A pedestrian crossing was at the far end of the tram platform. The tram I was on was occupying the track. In front of me was a wizened, hunched old woman – perhaps deaf, perhaps demented, perhaps both – standing in the centre of the platform. I kept asking politely if she could move so I could get past her. “Scusi? Spiacente? Umm ... hello? Buona sera? Could you move over a bit, please, so I can get past? Umm … ciao? Scusi? Hello? Can you hear me? Per favore? Hello?” No matter what I said, the old woman wouldn’t budge.

I soon felt a series of very sharp jabs in my calves. I turned around to see a young father pushing a stroller with his baby in it against my legs with his wife just behind him. “Scusi!” he snarled.

I snapped. Like most people, I don’t take too kindly to being physically assaulted. “What? Are you f#$%ing blind, you dumb c#$t? Can’t you f&*%ing see that there is this old bitch in front of us who won’t f@#%ing damn well move? For f*$!ing f*#&’s sake!” It’s very hard to be angry in a language you don’t know well so I reverted to English.

“No! No! No!” he shouted at me, assaulting me even harder with his baby’s stroller. He looked like he was about to smash my face in. Thankfully a small gap in the traffic suddenly appeared and I was able to jump off the platform onto the street and run across to the footpath.

Stuff Rome and stuff Italy.

I took the metro four stations on Line B from Policlinico to Colosseo. The Colosseum wasn’t open being well after sunset but it was pleasantly lit in a soft golden hue. I reflected upon the absurdity of how the Ancient Romans built a stadium and it is still standing two thousand years later while the government of my state of New South Wales is wasting $2.3 billion on knocking down two perfectly good stadiums built twenty and thirty years ago and building new ones to replace them. I would have to return in the daytime when it was open.

I then caught a bus back to Prati. Without an Italian SIM card (thanks a bloody lot, the Gorizia TIM shop), it was hard to find public transport information. The bus stop signs just showed a list of routes with no maps or timetables. After stumbling around the neighbourhood for ages I finally found the stop for the bus route I wanted. I then waited forever for the bus. In most European cities the buses, trams and trains are so frequent that you don’t need timetables, the vehicles just seem to magically appear as if your mere presence at the stop is enough to conjure it from thin air. Rome is not your typical European city. I was grateful when my bus finally appeared so I could grab dinner and retreat to my hotel room. I had the feeling that I would need to recuperate in order to strengthen myself for whatever Rome might throw at me over the next few days.

Orsanmichele Church in Florence

Mercato Centrale in Florence

Cannolo at the Mercato Centrale in Florence

On board the Prima carriage on the Italo train from Florence to Rome

High-speed Italo train at Roma Termini station

Antique 1940s tram in Rome

Pontifical Swiss Guards on sentry duty at the Vatican City border

Most of the border of the Vatican City is a very high, sloping brick wall

Tram at Piazza del Risorgimento in Rome

Train on Line B of the Rome Metro

The Colosseum at night

San Marino is a fantastic little country but there wasn’t much to detain me for more than two nights. I had to keep exploring the world, so I had a buffet breakfast at the Hotel Joli, checked out, and walked up to the bus interchange to wait for the 10:30 bus back to Rimini on the brilliantly sunny morning of Thursday 7 November 2019.

San Marino’s sole public transport link to the rest of the world is a single bus route that runs between the City of San Marino and Rimini on Italy’s Adriatic coast ten times a day. I boarded the comfortable modern bus – this time the driver put my five-euro note in the cash tray and gave me a ticket, what refreshing honesty – and the bus almost rolled downhill along the hairpin bends like a pinball in a waterslide all the way to Rimini. It entered the city (not much traffic this time), went past the Augustus Arch which was once the main gate to the city on the road from Rome and is still used by pedestrians two millennia later, and then to the nearby railway station where I disembarked.

Rimini is a mid-sized city on Italy’s eastern Adriatic seaboard and is best known for its immense length of beach lined with resort hotels; Italy’s Gold Coast. However, unlike the Gold Coast, Rimini actually has history and culture. Rimini has a historically significant old town. I had some two hours until my train so I went for a stroll.

First, I walked along the waterfront of Rimini’s ancient port to the Tiberius Bridge, a gleaming white span of stone arches. I walked across it. This is more amazing than it sounds. The Tiberius Bridge is two thousand years old, dating from the time when, well, Tiberius was Emperor of Rome. It is still in use and not just by Australian backpackers. Cars, trucks, Vespas, cyclists and pedestrians all use this two-millennia structure to get between Rimini’s city centre and its northern neighbourhoods. I smiled as I crossed it. In the Sydney suburb of Parramatta there is a sandstone arch bridge from the 1830s built by convicts, the Lennox Bridge is seen as a historic treasure and especially ancient. Ha. I learned about the Roman Empire at school, but learning about antiquity in history lessons is only in the abstract. When I walked on a structure built by a glorious long-dead empire that I have only ever known from textbooks – what a magnificent sentiment that experience aroused.

I headed back across the river to the historic centre following ancient city walls and then into the Piazza Cavour, Rimini’s main square, with its fifteenth-century church and Arabesque town hall. A short walk away through narrow, cosy shopping thoroughfares is the Malatesta Temple. This fifteenth-century church was built by Sigismondo Malatesta, a local nobleman, in honour of his mistress. God damn it, Italy!

I went back to the station. There was a left luggage office in there. When I arrived in Rimini I had intended to store my backpack there, but it was closed with a sign on the door that said in Italian “Back in 5 minutes”. I had waited five minutes and there was no sign of the attendant so I explored Rimini with my backpack on. When I returned to the station the office was still closed and there was an American couple standing in front of it waiting for it to open. They had been waiting twenty minutes. I told them of my experiences and advised them not to bother. God damn it, Italy!

After a yummy lasagne for lunch at the station restaurant, my first of two trains of the day arrived, the all-stations Regionale 6464 scheduled to depart at 13:15. It was a very nice train, an Alstom Pop, a brand-new sleek and shiny three-car electric train with USB chargers and comfortable high-back seats. I was impressed. Except for the annoying habit of only showing the next train on the platform displays several minutes before the train is due and not showing arrivals and departures in different colours on the displays in the booking hall, I have no complaints about Italian trains so far. They are reasonably frequent, comfortable, and (by European standards, not Australian standards) rather cheap. My fare to Florence was €13.95, hardly extortionate for a 163 kilometre journey.

The Alstom Pop took off from Rimini on the ruler-straight dead flat main line that runs along the very southernmost edge of the Po Valley plain where it meets the Apennine mountains. It stopped at every town, the service was well used and in parts it was standing room only. At one point I crossed the Rubicon. Yes, I did. A short distance north of Rimini the train crossed the Rubicon, a small muddy stream. It was hard to believe that such a puny river is of such historical importance. I said “alea iacta est” as the train went over the river – blink and you’ll miss it – even though I was crossing in the opposite direction to Julius Caesar who illegally led his army the other way back into the territory of the Roman Republic.

About forty-five minutes later I got off at the town of Faenza where I had only a few minutes to change to a small three-car diesel train along the minor branch line from Faenza to Florence. This mountainous line crosses the Apennines, following a vineyard-lined valley through tunnels and viaducts and the kind of ramshackle villages you see in television advertisements for pasta sauce. The terrain got steeper with forested mountains cleft by rushing rivers and scattered farms. After passing through a long tunnel the line descended the other side of the Apennines and into the grimy suburbs of Florence, a landscape of neglected apartment buildings and desolate railway stations where every surface was covered in graffiti.

At about four o’clock the train terminated at Firenze Santa Maria Novella station, Florence’s main railway terminus. I took a photo of my train. I guess you could call it Florence and the Machine.

Santa Maria Novella station is not what I was expecting from Florence. The station was built in the Fascist era and is a bland, utilitarian, modernist brick warehouse. Surely Italy’s greatest jewel of the Renaissance deserves a railway station more in keeping with the city’s aesthetic ethos?

It was about a fifteen minute walk to my room in my Airbnb host’s apartment. After climbing four stories – very high stories – a lovely young woman, Tina, welcomed me into her apartment. I do have ethical qualms about Airbnb, I do not think it is fair that tourists push locals out of their city’s rental market. But this is a spare bedroom in an apartment owned by Tina, a setup I am OK with.

Tina showed me around her gorgeously decorated apartment. Tina is a fashion designer of Serbian origin who moved to Florence to pursue her career. She showed me how to use her Bialetti Moka Pot – believe me, it takes practice. I couldn’t manage to brew anything except burnt charcoal toxic sludge or weak light-brown piss. I think I will stick with my trusty coffee plunger (what Australians call French presses) at home.

After dumping my luggage I kept exploring because there was something that was about to close soon. Only a few blocks away was the Galleria dell’Accademia. There is a statue in there you may have heard of. For some reason, I got free admission – I don’t know why, perhaps because it was close to closing time, but the front desk waved me through. I stepped in and then I saw it. Michelangelo’s David.

There is a psychiatric disorder called Stendhal’s Syndrome. It is caused by people seeing an immensely beautiful work of art and then descending into hysteric delirium so severe that staff have to call the police who haul the unfortunate sufferer off to the nearest lunatic asylum for a lengthy stay, presumably involving a frontal lobotomy, electro-convulsive therapy and a hundred different pills. I almost fell victim to Stendhal’s Syndrome. That is how beautiful David is.

How do I describe it? It’s like all the photographs you’ve seen, only better. The detail, man, the detail! The bulging veins on David’s wrist. The subtle definition of all the muscles. The determination in his face. The tinea on his left foot. No human being could possibly have made a sculpture so perfect; David must have been divinely inspired. There is no alternative rational explanation.

Though the Galleria dell’Accademia is smaller and not as well known as the Uffizi, it still has plenty of other artworks, some of them quite notable – The Rape of the Sabines, mediaeval triptychs, Renaissance portraits of Florentine nobles. They just can’t compare to Michelangelo’s David so I don’t really remember them.

I went on an evening ramble through Florence’s astounding historic old town. The centrepiece is the Duomo, the city’s cathedral. This is an unusual church – from afar it has a whimsical look, almost like it is a dollhouse constructed of coloured cardboard. When you look at the walls up close, you see that it is made of the most exquisite marble in multiple colours – white, green, pink. The pride in work of the artisans who built this thing was extraordinary.

Tina had given me plenty of restaurant recommendations all neatly written in a notebook left on the desk in my room. I chose a pasta restaurant. Pasta restaurants aren’t uncommon in Italy, but this one was special – the pasta was fresh. By “fresh”, I mean “the pasta does not even exist when you order it and a grinning Nonna makes it right there in front of your eyes”. Back home I buy expensive Italian pasta from the deli section of a greengrocer’s shop near my place, but now that I have eaten freshly made pasta, nothing I can buy in Australia could possibly compare. I’ve been spoilt.

My post-prandial perambulations led me through the Piazza della Repubblica, a large nineteenth-century square where a merry-go-round, ice cream stand and con artists were doing a roaring trade, and along the buzzing streets of Florence. I love European cities at night. So much life, so much spirit, so many things to do and see and eat and drink and buy, without any of the violence and bad attitude you see in Australian cities on weekend nights. Why does Australia have to be so … so … so bogan?

Mount Titano from the highway leaving San Marino

Augustus Arch in Rimini

Tiberius Bridge

Malatesta Temple

My train from Rimini to Faenza

Train from Faenza to Florence

Vineyards near Brisighella

Apennines scenery between Faenza and Florence

A very grotty railway station in Florence's suburbs

"David"

The other side of "David" you never see on postcards

David's tinea

Duomo of Florence

Piazza della Repubblica

I have a Slovenian colleague. A couple of years ago he gave me a small travel guide – a miniature coffee table book, really – called This Is Slovenia, presumably published by the Slovenian national tourism authority or some similar body. This tiny book that could easily fit in a breast pocket was packed full of colourful photographs of Slovenian scenery, dishes, animals, costumes and buildings, accompanied by clumsy English text that was probably translated from Slovene by a Year 9 work experience student of no particular academic ability.

Until I flicked through This Is Slovenia, I had no special interest in the country. I knew about as much about Slovenia as someone who loves geography would be expected to. I knew that it used to be part of Yugoslavia. I remember that there was a war of independence when I was a kid, I recall watching Yugoslav tanks rolling down a motorway towards Slovenia on National Nine News one evening. I knew that Slovenia was the most economically advanced and socially progressive of the former Eastern Bloc countries. I knew that Slovenia is mountainous. I knew that a prominent politician from the Australian Labor Party, Tanya Plibersek, is of Slovenian heritage, as is the notable philosopher Slavoj Žižek. I knew that the capital city was Ljubljana. I knew that Slovenia became a member of the European Union a few years ago. I remember reading an article in National Geographic about how the Slovenian government built special bridges with forests on them over motorways so bears could move from forest to forest without getting run over. And seriously, that is all I knew.

Reading This Is Slovenia aroused a little more interest in the country, along with further conversations I had during my lunch breaks with my colleague about his home country. If it weren’t for my colleague, I would never have come to Slovenia. And that would have been a pity because I fell in love with Slovenia. I shall sing the country’s praises for the rest of my life to everyone I meet. Random people sitting next to me on the train, drunken fools in the local pub, stakeholders in meetings at work, everyone. I am serious.

I have been to countries that have jaw-droppingly beautiful scenery. I have been to countries that have friendly, helpful, law-abiding, honest people. I have been to countries that have amazing food. But I have only been to two countries that have all three – Taiwan and Slovenia. Take a bow, Slovenia. You are a special country that shall forever stake a claim to a parcel in my heart.

It was with sadness and with trepidation that I left Slovenia on Tuesday 5 November 2019. Sadness because I didn’t want to leave and trepidation because I had heard too many horror stories about Italy from Slovenians and other travellers and to be perfectly honest, on that day I really didn’t want to go to Italy. If it wasn’t for having to fly home from Rome I would have stayed in Slovenia for the rest of my holiday.

But leave Slovenia I must. I got up early, I had a quick breakfast of leftover pastries from the bakery the day before, I showered, I finished my packing, I sent a message to Natalija and Jure that I was leaving, and walked across the road shortly before eight o’clock to catch a bus a short distance to the village of Podhom a few kilometres north of Lake Bled. At the bus stop I met a young Australian woman, my second Aussie of the trip. She was from Brisbane and was travelling around Europe with her Italian boyfriend. They were waiting for a bus to Ljubljana to go to the airport to fly to their next destination. Her boyfriend taught me a few words of Italian before they boarded their bus.

My bus arrived a few minutes after eight and I boarded. I was the only passenger. The bus terminated at Podhom a short walk from the railway station. Mind you, the word “station” might be a bit too generous. There was a station building, a solid two-storey building of rough-hewn stone but it was now used as the village café. The platform was a low-slung thing surfaced with gravel and ragged weeds. Grass was growing between the rusty rails and warped timber sleepers of the single railway track. If I didn’t know any better I’d have said that this was a railway that closed forty years ago.

I had about half an hour before my train to Nova Gorica along the famous Bohinj Railway. It was an overcast morning and it started to drizzle. I sought shelter in the station building café and ordered a coffee. The café was full of village men aged fifty to seventy smoking and sipping coffee and gossiping. As I entered they all fell silent and looked at me. They started talking again but every time I stole a glance at them I could see that they were looking at me with resentment and suspicion. Rural villages are the same everywhere in the world.

I lingered in the café although I felt far from welcome, it was starting to rain rather heavily outside. A few minutes before the train was due I went back out onto the unkempt gravelly platform. Soon enough a tiny little two-car diesel train appeared on time at 08:39. It was covered in graffiti except for the driver’s windows. It chugged into the station and squealed to a halt as the concertina doors like those on an old-fashioned bus folded open. The only other passengers to board at Podhom were a grandfather and his very young grandson. There was hardly anybody on board either.

It is not surprising that not many people use the Bohinj Railway. It goes from nowhere to nowhere via nowhere through the most inhospitable mountain terrain. Jesenice and Nova Gorica at each end of the line are hardly what you would call thriving metropolises. Its construction only makes sense when you realise that this railway line wasn’t built with passenger or freight revenue in mind. Rather, it is a “strategic railway”. The Bohinj Railway was built by the Austrian-Hungarian government in 1906 with the sole purpose of defence. The Habsburg regime was absolutely obsessed with maintaining access to Austria-Hungary’s ports on the Adriatic Sea. With good reason – these ports, outside the German-speaking heartland of modern Austria and populated by potentially rebellious and separatist Italians, Slovenes and Croats, were the sole way in which Austria-Hungary could conduct maritime trade and project naval power in the Mediterranean Sea and beyond. The Bohinj Railway was built as an alternative route from Austria to the Adriatic ports. If the Ottoman Army or Croatian nationalists, for instance, swept northwards up the Balkan peninsula and captured the Budapest-Rijeka main line or the Vienna-Trieste main line, the Bohinj Railway could maintain access between Vienna and the Adriatic.

So it should not be surprising that the Bohinj Railway is distinguished by its lack of patronage. Still, it is a shame, because it is one of the most beautiful railways I have been on. Slovenske železnice have chosen to keep the line open as it forms the sole public transport link in a string of remote mountain villages on both sides of the Julian Alps. Services are infrequent, seven trains a day run south from Jesenice to Nova Gorica.

The very bored conductor collected my fare soon after leaving Podhom. He spent much of the journey yawning, tapping his feet, dawdling back and forth, checking his watch, and presumably longing to be allocated a busier line on the next roster.

The scenery was great – what I could see of it through the driving rain, at least. I found it very difficult to take photographs because of the raindrops on the train’s windows, so you will have to take my word for it when I say that the Bohinj Railway is one of the five most beautiful railway lines I have had the honour to travel along.

First, the train headed southwest skirting around to the west of Lake Bled and then went up the Bohinj valley which I had travelled through on Sunday, a verdant dale lined with soaring cliffs punctuated by cascades. Even the torrential rain couldn’t efface the valley’s beauty.

The train stopped at the valley’s main town, Bohinjska Bistrica, and then continued south through a tunnel under the southern flank of the Julian Alps. The train was crawling through the tunnel at walking pace, the diesel engine gurgling softly. I had no idea why the train was going so slowly until I looked out the window. The tunnel was flooded. I turned my mobile phone’s torch on and pointed it down through the raindrops clinging to the glass. The raging torrent flowing north back to Bohinjska Bistrica was almost as high as the train’s floor. I couldn’t believe it – the driver was authorised to proceed through this? Every few hundred metres or so there was a sluice in the wall of the tunnel with a veritable cascade of rainwater thundering into the tunnel, making the torrent even more swollen.

After suddenly finding religion and praying that there wasn’t a flash flood coming down the tunnel from further south, the train finally emerged from the portal and turned west down the valley of the Bača river. In places the Bača was so full that it seemed mere minutes from bursting its banks. All along the Bača and the larger river it flows into, the Soča, were tiny little mountain villages of ramshackle, neglected cottages. This is by far the poorest part of Slovenia I have seen. The Bača and Soča valleys are remote, mountainous and far from any major trade route with barely a square inch of land flat enough for agriculture. I have no idea how the people in these impoverished hamlets make a living.

South of the flooded railway tunnel, the Bohinj Railway has some interesting features. There are lengthy “avalanche galleries”, long arcaded stone shelters along mountainsides which prevent avalanches from blocking the railway potentially causing major accidents. There are more tunnels than I could care to count as the track curves in and out of the steep slopes lining the valley. A few kilometres north of the line’s southern terminus at Nova Gorica, there is a very high arched bridge where the railway crosses the canyon formed by the Soča river.

The train arrived at Nova Gorica about twenty minutes late at around half past ten. This is an unusual station – an international border runs through the forecourt. I stepped out of the train, walked out through the booking hall, opened the door, walked a few metres across a large circular monument in the pavement, and thus did I enter Country No. 26 I have been in, Italy.

I took a few nerdy photos and videos of me crossing back and forth over the border. This nondescript station square was once the boundary between the capitalist and socialist worlds. For five decades after World War II this plaza, Trg Evrope (Square of Europe), was bristling with fences and razor wire and armed guards. Now I danced on the border, one step in Slovenia, two step in Italy, Slovenia, Italy, Slovenia, Italy …

I come from a country which has no international land borders, so I could have gladly spent all day enjoying the pure novelty of being able to jump to and fro from one country to another. But I had to continue on. Slovenia has excellent rail connections to Austria, Hungary and Croatia, but this cannot be said for trains from Slovenia to Italy. There aren’t many. There is a limited service between Ljubljana and Trieste which, coming from Lake Bled, would have required a tortuous detour via the southwest of Slovenia. Coming from the northwest of Slovenia, the only realistic way to get to Italy is to catch a train to Nova Gorica, take a local bus from Trg Evrope to Gorizia Centrale railway station several kilometres inside Italy, and catch an Italian train from there. After boarding a local Italian bus at Trg Evrope – it was unusual that you couldn’t buy tickets on board, rather, each stop has a ticket vending machine – I arrived about ten minutes later at Gorizia Centrale station. My first impression of Italy was – shutters! So many shutters! Every single window has shutters.

I bought a ticket with my credit card at the ticket machine at Gorizia Centrale. I clicked on the Union Jack on the language selection screen. I was greeted with a cheerful recorded message. “Beware of peek-pockets. In case of need, ask only Trenitalia staff for more eenformation.” Welcome to Italy!

I had about ninety minutes to kill in Gorizia, the twin town of Nova Gorica. One of the first things I do when I arrive in a new country is to buy a local SIM card. I use a lot of mobile data in order to view maps, look up public transport timetables, search for accommodation and tickets to venues, and most importantly, post metric truckloads of photos and videos to social media. TIM (formerly Telecom Italia), Italy’s largest mobile phone network, had a shop a few blocks north of the station. So I walked up there in the rain to buy a TIM SIM. I had already found the one I wanted online – there was a prepaid SIM card called TIM Tourist that seemed good value for money.

I went into the shop, waited for one of the two staff members to become available – they were arguing volubly with some customer whose increasing indignance was met with increasing aggression on the staff members’ part – and when the argument finally ended, I asked for a TIM Tourist SIM card in my very basic Duolingo Italian.

The TIM employee sat me down at a service desk, asked for my passport, photocopied it, then photocopied it again, then photocopied it even more. I was bamboozled with paperwork, huge sheets of paper with densely typeset microscopic font in impenetrable Italian. I was terrified that they were trying to sign me up for a contract.

“No, I don’t want a contract! I don’t want a plan. I only want a prepaid tourist SIM.”

“Ees no plan. Ees prepaid!”

“So why do I need to sign all these contracts?”

“Dees contract, issa for licence for foreigner to own SEEM card. Dees contract, issa for permission to use telephone in Eetaly.”

“Well, OK, I guess.”

Then they asked for ID that showed my address. They photographed my New South Wales driver’s licence a dozen times. I had a closer look at the things I was being asked to sign, not that I could make sense of the dense Italian legalese. I noticed that the price was different to that of the TIM Tourist SIM pack advertised on their website. The contract I was reading said it was nineteen euros.

“No, ees not TIM Tourist. Dees SEEM card I sell you ees cheaper. Only nineteen euro. More data. More meenutes.”

“But I said I want the TIM Tourist SIM, not some other SIM."

“No, dees SIM ees better for you.”

“All right, whatever you say.”

The two staff members were photocopying the photocopies of my ID, typing furiously into their computer terminals, calling some remote bureaucracy to set up my account.

“Listen! I have bought many SIM cards in many countries, it is not supposed to be this hard.”

“No! Dees is special SEEM, just for you. Best SEEM for you.”

“Listen. Can I just have the TIM Tourist SIM card, please?”

“No. Ees not available here.”

“But you didn’t say that before. You just said that this SIM card is a better deal.”

“No speaka da English good.”

I smelled a rat. I was also looking at the clock – I only had about twenty minutes until my train. I had hoped to buy a SIM card and then grab lunch somewhere. I was starting to get a tad hungry eating only a few leftover pastries at seven o’clock. I was debating with myself whether to just cancel my purchase and leave – but I was desperate to get a SIM card, it would be my only chance today.

Finally – finally! – it was time to pay. The amount appeared on the PIN pad. Thirty-nine euros.

“Listen! The contract said it was only nineteen euros. You told me it was only nineteen euros. Why am I now being charged thirty-nine euros?”

“Issa nineteen for the SEEM, and issa twenty for the SEEM.”

“Sorry?”

“I said, issa nineteen for the SEEM, and issa twenty for the SEEM.”

“That makes absolutely no sense!” Still, I needed a SIM card, time was flying away, so I inserted my credit card and entered my PIN. Transaction declined.

I tried again. Transaction declined. I tried with my two other bank cards. All times, transaction declined. It turns out that the EFTPOS line was down. And a lucky stroke it was that the EFTPOS line was down. Two days later when I arrived in Florence, I told my Airbnb host about what happened at the TIM shop in Gorizia. She told her boyfriend who works as a technician for a telephone company. He told me that it was obvious to him that they were trying to sign me up for a twenty-four-month contract, prepaid SIM cards do not require that much paperwork. If the EFTPOS lines had worked, nineteen euros a month plus an initial twenty euro SIM card purchase fee would have been billed to my credit card every month for two years. He said it’s common knowledge in Italy that mobile phone companies are notorious for this fraudulent behaviour and that I was right to be suspicious. May the employees at the Gorizia TIM shop forever be subject to the righteous scorn and anger they so richly deserve. Absolute bottom-feeding pond scum.

I had to leave the TIM shop in any case, though the employees kept imploring me to stay to wait for the EFTPOS line to be restored. I just pointed at my watch and shouted “Train! Train!” They were angry at me for leaving, but I had a train to catch. There was a café a bit down the street towards the station, I went in there to buy a quick lunch from the sandwich display, a tramezzino – tuna and tapenade between two half-slices of white bread with the crusts removed. I ordered the tramezzino to go, the girl took the tramezzino, and promptly disappeared back into the kitchen with it. “Oi! Train! Train soon! Scusi? Train! Train dieci minuti! Need food now!” But she ignored me.

Finally she reappeared with my sandwich which I wolfed down in about twenty seconds – a snack rather than a lunch. I then ran to the station. I had a few minutes to spare and so went to buy a packet of chips from the station vending machine. Which, of course, promptly swallowed my money and dropped my purchase into the collection chute below – but the chute wouldn’t open.

I lost it. I kicked and banged the vending machine like a toddler having a tantrum. “Does anything in this blasted country ever f#$%ing work!” I shouted. Thankfully the owner of an adjacent news kiosk had a key to the vending machine and graciously opened the vending machine and gave me my purchase. But my goodness, how I hated Italy already.

I looked up at the next train display in the booking hall. The train to Venice was leaving in a few minutes on platform 1. I walked onto platform 1 but the displays on the platform were saying the next train was to Trieste while the displays on platform 2 were showing Venice. How does that work? I went back into the station hall – the display definitely said platform 1. So which platform did I have to take?

I took a risk and went to platform 2. I went right along the platform asking waiting passengers if they spoke English, and of course none of them did. So I just ended up shouting at random people “Venezia? Venezia?”

“Si, si, Venezia,” they reassured me. It turns out that I was looking at the wrong display in the booking hall. One display was for arrivals, the other for departures. Showing both departures and arrivals common in Europe, but in most European countries arrivals are shown in white and departures are shown in yellow. There were no such colours to distinguish them in Italian railway stations. Lesson learned!

The Regionale train arrived on time at about twenty to one, an extremely long train of white, green and blue carriages hauled by green electric locomotives at each end. I settled into my seat and looked at the scenery. Gorizia is where the Slovenian Alps meet the vast pancake-flat plains of northern Italy and soon the train was rocketing through the scratchy, yellowish countryside of Friuli Venezia Giulia with scrubby little villages, ochre farmhouses, threadbare poplars along country lanes and enormous wide gravelly rivers consisting of dozens of rapid channels of gurgling grey water braided through the gravel banks like a girl’s pigtails. Off to the right, the Alps loomed ominously on the northern horizon.

The train entered Venice’s suburbs and soon enough at a quarter to three I disembarked at Venezia Mestre station, an important interchange station on Venice’s suburban mainland. I had originally intended to visit Venice for two nights, but I decided to ditch Venice and instead spend a couple of extra nights in Slovenia.

I had about twenty minutes until my next train. I entered the enormous station building, a dizzying mess of rushing passengers and retail outlets. I spied a large shop that sold sandwiches and pizza slices and salads and the like. I went up to the counter and ordered a sandwich.

“No, you can’t order here. You have to order at the cash register over there.” The serving girl pointed to an unattended counter across the hall with no employee at the till and a massive queue stretching a mile.

“But you have a cash register right there in front of you,” I said as I pointed at the machine right before her eyes.

“Sorry. But you can’t order food here. You have to order over there.”

The minutes were ticking away and I was still starving. It was now shortly before three o’clock. Eating only leftover half-eaten pastries for breakfast at seven o’clock, and half a sandwich and a tiny bag of chips at half past twelve would leave anybody famished by mid-afternoon. I was running around Venezia Mestre station – no mean feat with fourteen kilograms on my back – desperately trying to find a food outlet that looked like it would serve something quick, that was actually attended by staff and didn’t have a lengthy queue. Finally I found a place that sold bagels and the like. I ordered a bagel with cream cheese and bresaola (air-cured beef) from the display on top of the counter. The guy behind the counter took the bagel and then put it into a toaster oven.

“No, no, no! Non tostato!”

“Si, si, devere tostato,” or something like it that translated to “yes, yes, it must be toasted”, the bagel guy replied. So I waited and waited and waited for my bagel to be toasted. When it was finally finished, the man took the bagel tenderly out of the toaster oven, delicately removed the top half of the bagel, and oh-so-gently sprinkled olive oil on the fillings, and carefully dusted some herbs and then ever so lovingly tapped some sesame seeds from a bottle. I am sure this would have been a lovely touch at a sit-down restaurant, but for f$%*ing Christ’s sake, you are just a f$%*ing sandwich shop in a busy railway station where everyone is in a hurry and just wants food to go as quickly as possible and there are only eight minutes until my next train God damn you so just give me my f$%*ing bagel or else you frigging moron!

I couldn’t snatch my bagel from the guy quick enough – I hope he felt the fear of God as I gave him the stink eye while doing so – then I glanced at the next train display in the main station hall and ran down the subway to platform 8. I got to the platform and the displays on the platform were blank. Surely that couldn’t be right? So I ran back down the subway to the station hall and checked the main display. Yes, I had the right platform. Yes, I was definitely looking at the departures screen, not the arrivals screen. So why were the displays on platform 8 blank? Because the Italian railways only show the next train on the platform displays several minutes before the train is due! Genius stuff.

My train arrived on time at 15:07, the Frecciabianca high-speed train. The Frecciabianca is the slowest of Trenitalia’s three classes of high-speed trains, typically running on ordinary tracks and reaching a maximum speed of two hundred kilometres an hour. I boarded the sleek, long white train and it took me forever to take my seat because Italians, God bless their cotton socks, would have to be the most unruly, disorganised people I have ever encountered. The aisle along the carriage was a jumble of suitcases owned by people arguing noisily with each other over who should move out of whose way and neither yielding to the other. God, how I wished that this train was going the other way back to Slovenia.

The Frecciabianca headed southwest through Padua, Rovigo, Ferrara, across more scratchy, vaguely unkempt yellow fields, past villages that all looked exactly the same – the same bland blocky churches, the same two-storey ochre houses with the same curved roof tiles, the same rows of poplar trees on the residential streets. The only interesting sight was of the Euganean Hills, a series of abrupt jagged peaks emerging from the dreary flatlands that reminded me a lot of the Glass House Mountains in Queensland. Around sunset the train reached Bologna, a bustling city of even more bright red terracotta roof tiles.

I stayed on the train for a short while after Bologna and disembarked at the coastal resort city of Rimini at 17:41. By now the sun had disappeared. It had also begun to rain heavily. I lugged my backpack out of the station and entered traffic hell. The street outside Rimini station was a jumble of cars, taxis and buses with drivers blaring their horns. I have no idea why anybody would use their horn. I mean, I always thought that horns were used to let other motorists know that you are there. Blind Freddie could see that you are there, along with a million other vehicles, each one unable to move because the cars were positioned across the lanes at every conceivable angle. It was geometrically impossible for any car to move, like a collapsed heap of Jenga blocks.

The bus to San Marino left from a stop opposite the station, not that it was easy to find; I had to hunt for the stop by checking the timetables at each individual stop. It was only about twenty minutes waiting in the rain for the bus, the shelter was too full. My Macpac rain jacket came in rather handy.

The bus to San Marino arrived on time at 18:10, a miracle considering the traffic. The fare was five euros paid to the driver. The driver took my five-euro note and put it in his pocket without giving me a ticket. Ah, that famous Italian corruption! How lovely.

The bus departed and got promptly stuck in all the traffic. It went for block after block. After an eternity we finally got out of Rimini’s city centre and onto the main road heading southwest into the hills towards San Marino. Eventually we passed under an ornamental footbridge festooned with a message. “BENVENUTI NELL’ANTICA TERRA DELLA LIBERTÀ”. Welcome to the Ancient Land of Liberty. And so I entered Country No. 27 I have been in, the Most Serene Republic of San Marino, and the second time that I have visited three countries in one day.

The road kept going up and up, through an unattractive urban ribbon of casinos, private investment banks, insurance offices, duty-free shops and all the other paraphernalia you find in microstates. The bus swerved around hairpin bends, roundabouts, switchbacks and blind corners. It was exciting in the same way that aircraft turbulence is exciting.

Due to the traffic in Rimini the bus arrived at the terminus in the City of San Marino quite late, it was approaching eight o’clock. I had looked up my hotel on Google Maps when I still had mobile data in Slovenia, I clearly recalled that the Hotel Joli was immediately north of the bus interchange, so I walked north and got lost in some neighbourhood. It was completely silent except for the wind howling through the steep narrow streets. The City of San Marino – city is probably too generous a word for a town of four thousand people – is located on the crest of a ridge seven hundred metres above sea level. It is exposed from all directions and the winds are brutal, as was the rain. The rain was horizontal. My rain jacket was no use, I got soaked trying to find my hotel.

There was nobody who could help me, the streets were dead. A car passed on the streets only occasionally. Not a shop or restaurant was to be seen. I know that San Marino is a very small country but I still would have thought that there would be some life in a national capital. I had no mobile data, my prepaid Slovenian SIM card didn’t work in Italy, so I couldn’t check Google Maps. My Lonely Planet’s guide to Italy devoted one whole page to San Marino with no map included. I was seriously lost, hungry , freezing and sopping wet.

I kept heading north to no avail, it was just a rabbit warren of residential streets that ended at the terminus of the ridge. I walked back to the bus station. I looked for a map, there was nothing. I desperately looked for a public telephone so I could call the hotel for directions, I saw none. All the while I was getting more and more saturated, the wind chilling me to the bone.

Finally I saw a person. He was walking his dog – in this weather! He couldn’t speak English so I asked him where the Hotel Joli was in Italian, and he answered in Italian clear enough for me to understand. The hotel was about one kilometre to the south, next to the roundabout.

I had to restrain myself from prostrating on the ground before him in adulation as I worshipped the very ground he walked on. He saved my life! I walked along the street south from the bus station and he wasn’t lying, the Hotel Joli soon appeared, its maroon and white illuminated sign beckoning me into its dry, warm, generous bosom.

So what happened? Well, there are two bus stations in the San Marino city centre. One is for tourist coaches, the other is for public buses. The bus interchange beside the hotel is for tourist coaches. All this could have been avoided if the dishonest scoundrels at the TIM shop in Gorizia had sold me a prepaid TIM Tourist SIM like I had bloody well asked, but no. I hope they burn in hell.

I checked into my hotel, dried myself off, and had a late dinner at a nearby restaurant that was still open, Agli Antichi Orti. The food was good - a hearty main course of tagliatelle with a tomato-based ragù, a hearty second course of grilled vegetables, a hearty bowl of crusty bread and a hearty carafe of rich red wine. The service from the elderly proprietor was excellent. It was just what I needed after what was a very long and rather difficult day.

Podhom station

Bohinj Valley in the rain

Soča river from the Bohinj Railway

Solkan Bridge over the Soča river near Nova Gorica

Bohinj Railway train at Nova Gorica

Nova Gorica railway station and the border

The Italy-Slovenia border at Nova Gorica railway station

Border monument on the Italy-Slovenia border

The Alps from the plains of Friuli Venezia Giulia

Piave river in northern Italy

Euganean Hills

Welcome to Italy

Welcome To The Ancient Land Of Liberty

Dinner in San Marino

Grilled vegetables in San Marino

I have a theory that there are only three things on which it is impossible to overdose:

1. Trains
2. Waterfalls
3. Caves

It may be impossible to overdose on these, but I may as well try.

So I found myself on a grey, gloomy Thursday morning checking out of the Dežnik guesthouse, storing my luggage there, and walking down quiet, empty streets to Ljubljana railway station. I wondered why there were no cars on the roads and all the shops were shut. I googled "public holidays slovenia" on my phone and found that today was Reformation Day commemorating the day that Martin Luther nailed his ninety-five theses to the door of a church in Germany. It seems like an odd holiday for a country that is overwhelmimgly Catholic.

Public holidays in Europe really are public holidays. Things actually shut. Perhaps the Australian system is more convenient for tourists, where things are allowed to stay open but they have to pay their staff more. But what good is a public holiday if so many people still have to work?

I bought my ticket, splashing out about another three euros for first class, and caught the same train that I had taken the previous afternoon, the "Pohorje" intercity tilting train. I was even travelling on the same line southwest of Ljubljana but this time I got off much earlier at Postojna.

I walked about half an hour from Postojna station through an attractive, modern but eerily silent mid-sized country town to Postojna Caves. I bought a ticket for about thirty-five euros which entitled me to a tour of the caves and also Predjama Castle about nine kilometres further down the road. They do run shuttle buses between the two attractions but only in the summer months. I had to spend another thirty euros on a taxi organised by the caves visitor centre. Gulp. Oh well. You only live once. It's only money. Gulp.

After a short wait the taxi van appeared. The driver was friendly and knowledgeable and talked about the history of the area - the fierce battles in World War One when Slovenia was the front line between Austria-Hungary (on the side of the Germans) and Italy (on the side of the Allies), about how some fields used to be a lake but were drained by farmers many centuries ago, and he pointed out a cave in which Neanderthal remains were found.

Soon I reached Predjama Castle. This isn't any old castle. Predjama is built into the side of a cliff. How cool is that? I went in and saw how the rooms and the corridors merged seamlessly between artificial wall and natural rockface.

Predjama Castle's most famous resident was a Slovenian folk hero, Erazem Predjamski, who allied himself with the common people against Habsburg tyranny. After he killed a favourite of the Habsburg king, there was a price on his head. Erazem holed himself up in his magnificent castle and the Habsburg troops laid siege.

Behind the castle is a network of caves which lead to a ground entrance in the mountains behind the castle, this enabled Erazem to replenish his supplies. He even taunted the Habsburg soldiers by throwing fresh cherries at them from the parapets. It seemed as if there were no way to dislodge Erazem from his impregnable fortress.

But there was one room with thin walls - the toilet. The troops bribed a servant to display a candlelight signal when Erazem went to the loo. When the Habsburg troops saw the candlelight, they flung a boulder with a catapult right into the toilet, causing the toilet to collapse and crushing Erazem to death. What a way to go.

The taxi met me at the castle entrance at the agreed time and I was whisked back to Postojna Caves in time for the two o'clock tour. I wasn't the only one, there were hundreds of others. We were divided into language groups and then led through a short passage where a train was waiting for us - a cute little battery-operated toy train, that took us into the bowels of the earth, through the most beautiful and intricate stalactites and stalagmites and columns, all artistically illuminated.

At the end of the ten-minute train journey we were led on a walking tour through various chambers. There was the Spaghetti Chamber where the stalactites on the ceiling were so pale and thin and straight that they looked like dangling noodles. There was the Red Chamber (it does exactly what it says on the tin) as well as the White Chamber (ditto). There was the Postojna Cave's most famous sight, "Brilliant", a pure white stalagmite several metres tall that looked like a giant melted candle. We finished our walking tour at the Concert Hall, an enormous hemispherical chamber in which concerts are actually held before an audience of thousands. The train then took us back up to the surface.

There is a debate about which caves are better, Postojna or Škocjan. Personally I prefer Škocjan even though I loved Postojna, simply due to the sheer immensity of the Škocjan Caves that swallow you whole and turn you into a mere atom. However, Postojna has more intricate and beautiful cave formations, and the lighting is much better at Postojna too. Postojna allows you to take photographs, which is prohibited at Škocjan. I also found that Postojna had an artifical theme park feel with its little kiddie-sized train and smooth, gently sloping, step-free path that even toddlers can do. Škocjan felt more authentic. Also, Škocjan took commitment. There was a lengthy walk from the visitor centre to the cave entrance, there were hundreds of steps, you had to be careful where you stepped. I found that this made the Škocjan Caves more rewarding. My hot tip: see both like I did. They are both great. You won't regret it.

I caught a coach back to Ljubljana. I would have just missed a train and the next train wasn't due at Postojna for ninety minutes. Slovenian railways are well maintained and reliable and modern, but the services are not very frequent and they are very slow due to all the twisty mountain tracks that haven't been straightened out since they were built in the 1850s. Sounds like a certain state that I live in!

Eva at the guesthouse had recommended that I see Metelkova before I go. Metelkova used to be a barracks of the Yugoslav National Army in the heart of Ljubljana. After Slovenia declared its independence in 1991 and emerged victorious from a ten-day war, the Yugoslav army abandoned the barracks. Various groups of students, anarchists, hippies and other alternative lifestylers occupied Metelkova and turned it into an autonomous commune. It still is. Unfortunately when I went there, the only people I could see were dodgy little knots of dodgy young men huddling conspiratorially, presumably they were esteemed providores of the finest powdery substances from Colombia and Afghanistan. There was some interesting street art but overall it was just another filthy graffiti-ridden squat like Christiana in Copenhagen.

After a quick dinner at a felafel restaurant, I walked back to Dežnik and collected my backpack. I heartily recommend staying here, at a real family-owned guesthouse rather than an impersonal hotel owned by some multinational corporation, a place where you will be welcomed with amazing Slovenian helpfulness and hospitality. The fact that Dežnik is in the heart of the cutest little city you will ever see is just an added bonus.

It was time for one more train. I walked back to Ljubljana station and bought another ticket to Lesce-Bled. The sleek, shiny, red, nearly empty Siemens Desiro went northwest through the dark evening gloom. About an hour later I emerged from the train, a taxi was waiting on the platform. There were probably buses but I couldn't have been bothered, I was tired and just wanted to sleep. I introduced myself to the driver and asked him to take me to my apartment in Lake Bled about five kilometres away. Even though he used the meter, the fare was €16.30. Slovenian taxis are pure extortion. I should have taken the bus instead. I checked the timetables later and there was actually a bus not long after I got off the train.

I checked into the apartment using the precise detailed instructions the Airbnb host had sent to me, and enjoyed a quiet night doing precisely nothing for a change.

Tilt train to Postojna

Predjama Castle

Train in Postojna Cave

Postojna Cave

Curtain formations at Postojna Cave

Red Chamber at Postojna Cave

Postojna Cave

“Brilliant” stalagmite at Postojna Cave

Spaghetti Chamber at Postojna Cave

Train at Postojna Cave

Train to Lesce-Bled

Metelkova