The proper way to travel around in Europe is by train. Europe is a compact continent with an intensive rail service and with stations in some of the most beautiful towns in the world. Train services can range from rapid luxury like Italy’s ‘Freccia Bianca’ to olde-worlde narrow gauge and rack-and-pinion lines. It’s just a pity that so many travellers think the best way to travel to the Continent from the UK, is to head for the nearest airport.

When I was a child it was usual for my parents to go to Victoria station and book a ticket for the Continent before ever thinking of flying. Of course, rail travel was then cheaper, especially in pre-rail-privatised Britain and low-cost flights were unknown. It’s unfortunate that the pricing of different modes of travel has changed so much these days. My train ticket from Stansted airport to London (distance 31 miles) for example, costs more (£20.20) than my plane ticket from Pisa to Stansted (distance 735 miles, price £19.99). Crazy! Un-ecological and corrupt rating on a quite unacceptable scale I think…

In 1963 I did the journey travelling alone to Rome. My train from Victoria to the coast was hauled by this glorious beast:

In 1977 I was still able to reach Italy more cheaply by train rather than by plane. My ticket from Cambridge to Catania in Sicily enabled me to break my journey at any station I wished and use the same ticket to continue travelling. I remember stops at Naples, Rome, Pisa and Genoa on this, my last big journey as a single person.

Not only that. I travelled direct to Catania from Calais without changing trains! In those days there was a direct service from Calais to Italy passing through Northern France via Lille, Metz and Strasbourg, entering Switzerland at Basle and continuing through the St Gotthard tunnel. This was, of course, the same route – with the addition of the train service from Victoria to Dover (or was it Folkestone?) and the Cross-Channel ferry – that I would take with my parents to visit relatives in Milan (whose flat was conveniently situated in the same square as Stazione Centrale’s vast neo-Assyro-Babylonian pile).

It was a prodigious journey. Certainly a little long at 24 hours duration but with none of the hassles one encounters today when changing trains at Paris is de rigeur. Moreover, it was cheap with absolutely no thought of heading for an airport. The only problem I remember was handling passport checks in early morning hours at Basel and the Italian frontier when one was awakened from deep couchette sleep by officious customs executives. The European Union was in its fledgling state then and the Schengen agreement just a dream. Now of course, it’s all different except for the United Kingdom which as a result of the infamous 2016 referendum has regressed and now has to undergo antediluvian passport checks (and apparently worse is to follow with biometrics next year).

Italy remains a fabulous train travel country. If one avoids those fast ‘Freccie’ expresses it’s perfectly possible to take a very reasonably priced train anywhere one likes on the peninsula. For unlike post-Beeching Britain Italy has relatively few lines cut (or ‘rami secchi’ – dead branches) and the network is not unfairly centred on the capital. To get to Rome from Lucca, for example, I needn’t take a train to Florence and change on a ‘Freccia’. Instead I grab the local to Pisa and then transfer to the highly scenic coast route to Rome’s Stazione Termini spending a fraction of the ‘Freccia’ cost –  a distance of around 220 miles at ticket prices that can be as low as Euros 21.20…

What are my most memorable train journeys not only in Italy but in the world? I admit I have not spent as much time traveling via the Iron Horse as I would have liked to. Over time, however, I have found the following itineraries unforgettable.

Starting with Europe and Italy:

1. The Circumetnea railway.

This is a Sicilian narrow gauge   (3 ft. 1+³⁄₈ in), railway constructed between 1895 and 1898 running round Europe’s largest volcano, Mount Etna passing some of the island’s most attractive villages; Randazzo, for example, and Bronte, whose citizens made Horatio Nelson a Count to thank him for his services. And if one is wondering about those literary sisters then it was their father who changed the family surname in honour of England’s greatest maritime hero.

I remember these villages as a child travelling on the circumetnea with my uncle’s family. (He was then professor of French literature at Catania University). The narrow streets seemed very ancient and a little creepy. The inhabitants also gazed at us in what I felt were a suspicious way. Of course, everything must have changed now and these villages have become attractive tourist destinations with a thriving agricultural production of wines and oranges on the fertile volcanic slopes.

2. Ferrovia a cremagliera Stresa-Mottarone.

I am old enough to remember venturing to the top of the mountain overlooking Lago Maggiore on the original rack and pinion railway. This was closed down in 1963 and substituted in 1970 by the cable-car on which tragically last year fourteen passengers plunged to their death. I remain very suspicious of cable cars and avoid them like the plague. How I wish the old rack-and-pinion could be reinstalled! At least its former bed has been converted into a mountain bike trail.

3. La Porrettana.

This was the original railway between Florence (via Pistoia) and Bologna and remained so until it was superseded by Mussolini’s engineering project, the Grande Galleria dell’Appennino, in the 1930’s.  The Porrettana is a 99 km long single-track line and was the first connection through the Apennines connecting Bologna to Pistoia. Also known as the Central Italy railway, the Porrettana was officially inaugurated by Vittorio Emanuele II in 1864. At the time it was a work of enormous engineering significance, with its forty-seven tunnels and thirty five bridges and viaducts. The most difficult stretch was that between Pracchia and Pistoia, where a difference in height of 550 meters was overcome in 26 km of track. The undertaking was entrusted to the French engineer Jean Louis Protche who, in order to avoid a rack-and-pinion solution solved the problem by designing two railway hairpin bends in the Piteccio-Corbezzi section.

At the time the Porrettana was considered a gargantuan engineering project. The work was undertaken without any of the mechanised construction aids we are used to today: the hero of that railway was surely the navvy

By the turn of the twentieth century, however, the “Porrettana” was regarded as being too slow. Single-tracked and with severe gradients it impeded economic development and communications between the regions of Tuscany and Emilia-Romagna. A new project was, therefore, initiated with construction works lasting from 1913 to 1934, somewhat slowed down by the First World War and subsequent economic and political crises. The centrepiece of this project, known as “la Direttissima”, the “Grande Galleria dell’Appennino”, 18.5 km long took eleven years to excavate.

The construction of this railway (as with so many others in Italy: we have only to think of the fatalities in the construction of the Lupaccina tunnel on our own Lucca to Aulla Line) was marred by deaths and endemic silicosis in its workers. However, when the “Direttissima” was finally inaugurated in 1934 it created a revolution in transport links between the two great cities of Florence and Bologna, as the “Porrettana” had done seventy years previously.,

With the advent of high-speed-train technology even “la Direttissima” has become out-of-date except for local traffic – hence the Firenze-Bologna TAV (Treno Alta Velocità) project. We have also travelled on the third railway line to be built across the Apennines. It was not much of a sight-seeing experience because of the many tunnels (one would have to travel on the Porrettana for Apennine landscape appreciation, perhaps on one of the steam trains which still occasionally run on it) but it was certainly a great technological thrill.

The Apennine tract from Florence to Bologna covers 78.5 kilometres and runs almost entirely through tunnels to the length of 73.3 kilometres. Started in 1996 and completed in 2009 it’s the third railway line between Bologna and Florence.

As with that other TAV project, still under construction, the Turin-Lyon line, there have been considerable environmentalist protests since any excavation under mountains can clearly affect drainage patterns. I sympathise with environmentalists on many points but I do feel the future is with high-speed-train links in Europe as a way of reducing the complete absurdity of much-more-polluting air flights.

4. The ‘Garfagnana’ Lucca-Aulla railway line.

One of my favourite Italian railway lines is the one I take to go either south to Lucca or north to Aulla or which stops at our local station of Bagni di Lucca (Fornoli). Traversing the Serchio valley with spectacular view of the Apuan Mountains on one side and the Apennines on the other it was originally built for strategic reasons as an alternative to the coast route from Pisa to Genoa which goes through the Versilia. The railway, also known as the “Garfagnana railway”, was started in 1892 and not completed until 1959! I always love it when the train goes under the Devi’s bridge at nearby Borgo a Mozzano.

Other fabulous railway journeys in Italy to mention?  They’ll have to wait for the time being as I’m off to the river for a cool-down swim as the temps are now 37 C and it’s only just past 10 AM!

I do hope, however, that senseless air flights from the UK to Italy will soon be a thing of the past on grounds of both environment and of cost and that everyone will again travel by rail (or car-on-rail): surely the only sensible way to journey across such a compact continent as Europe. I truly hope that the time will soon come when no-one will bat an eye-lid when I go to my local London station at Abbey Wood and ask for a cheap return to Bagni di Lucca!

Yesterday my wild-life night-time vision camera arrived (a ‘PH700A trail’ manufactured by Shenzhen Zecre Technology company Ltd. of Guangdong, China) courtesy of the ones who send you things in a carton with a curved arrow printed on it. My budding Attenboroughian instincts prompted me to follow the example of a compatriot who has a place on the opposite side of our valley and purchased a similar type of camera. His collection of night-time wildlife included daini (deer), badger, fox, a porcupine and those damned cinghiali (wild boars) who we suspected were guilty of upturfing the ground surrounding our (now) sturdily fenced off orto (vegetable patch).

I studied the instruction manual for the camera (which remarkably cost me rather less than Euros 50), selected what I trusted were the correct settings and strapped it to one of the plum trees overlooking our orto.

Here’s what the camera snapped while I was away from it. These shots were unloaded this morning….

So…what we had always suspected! Trench warfare was being conducted by the most ‘boring’ of animals…the cinghiale or wild boar. What surprised me, however, was that not only did these tusked and often quite aggressive beasts  wander about devastating our personal grassland during the night-time but they also had the cheek to venture quite regardless during the early daylight hours while we were still having our breakfast.

I was suitably impressed by my new toy and especially by the data it provided me on time and temperatures (which continues to soar up to 39C in our part of the world).

I ‘m now looking forwards to capturing photos of further forest denizens surrounding our place. Probably many of them will be somewhat unsavoury ones like those stoats in the wood described in that favourite book ‘The wind in the willows’!

Anyway, if something really unusual turns up during my wild-life camera’s surveillance I’ll post it here. Incidentally, the only night-time bipeds we’ll ever want to see are those sporting a pair of wings. I’d love to get pictures of an owl, for example!

Now that ‘Neighbours’, that long-running soap from Oz has ended (not that I ever watched it…) I reflected upon our own neighbours and came to the conclusion that the best thing about where we’ve moved since just before Christmas last year is that we don’t have any neighbours (or at least any within fifteen minutes walking distance).

Why that reflection? Surely Italy is a nice friendly country where people actually talk to their neighbours unlike those inhabiting East Cheam? Actually that is the problem. It’s OK to meet neighbours occasionally but when they’re permanently lodged next to one’s habitation it’s can be a different matter. Frankly, there are times when I want to have my privacy all to myself and not be in what often seems to be in a continued public gaze no matter how much I might crave for fame or signing autograph books.

Actually when we lived in Longoio this wasn’t as bad as it could have been for our residence there was detached with three sides surrounded by woodland instead of other people’s houses. Moreover, the houses on the remaining side were holiday homes, largely unoccupied for much of the year and in one case left unvisited by their owners for almost three years.

It’s quite OK if one owns a holiday home in an Italian Apennine village and visits it for a few weeks a year. (Incidentally thanks to all those wonderful people who voted Brexit in even those visits are now curtailed to ninety days in a period of six months…). However, if one intends to make one’s home in this country a semi-permanent one (as in my case where I’ve been working in education here) then a completely isolated house with an ample ‘cordon sanitaire’ of woodland and meadows surrounding it is preferable.

At the same time I do not envisage a place utterly isolated in a secret valley or a hidden mountain chasm requiring ropes or crampons to reach it for people of a certain age (like us). Reasonable road access is essential. And especially…space to park the car near the front door – and leave it there – without having to lug one’s shopping up a steep track.

Our new house continues to satisfy our preference for a reasonably isolated location but with easy road access. (Indeed there is even a bus stop at the end of our driveway. Maybe it’s always been my secret ambition to own a house with its own personal bus stop and our little farmhouse is the sort of place one could easily turn into a family nudist colony and not raise objections from others (unless a double-decker bus comes along). It’s also the sort of place where we can absolutely decide who we want to see and certainly not the sort of place where others see us whether we want to see them or not.

It’s interesting how humanity’s privacy is constantly being eroded around lives with the rapid spread of electronic data communication and increasing computerisation and how as a result so many of us crave more and more for a spot of blessed earth free from prying eyes that we can truly call our own.

Talking about electronic data communication – or as the Italians like to call it ‘I social’ – I have been ruminating on all those methods of keeping in touch since the days when the only way to know what others were up to (apart from chatting over the garden fence) was by picking up a fixed-line phone or writing a letter (and remembering to post it!). Now, of course, it is a rather different picture with media apps like Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, WhatsApp, Tik-Tok, Email, Instagram widely used, especially by the latest generation. Which ones to choose from?

The only ‘social’ I regularly use (apart from my mobile – I gave up my fixed line phone ages ago) are WhatsApp, Email, my Blog and Facebook.

Does this mean that all my Facebook friends are really my friends? Or that my friends are all on Facebook? Of course not! Like a Venn diagram only some of my Facebook friends are those who I would call friends and those who I call friends are not all on Facebook.

It does, however, mean that in many cases I know more about what’s happening to my Facebook ‘friends’ than what life-events are afflicting my non-Facebook ones.

Clearly, all this boils down to an individual’s sense of social space by which I mean not only how far we tolerate other humanoid habitations from our own but also how far away from our face we are willing to tolerate them talking to us. (In Italy, for example, I find some people talk to you uncomfortably close to your face.)

I wonder how aspects of human social space in different cultures will develop in a world with an ever-frenetic population explosion. As previously stated we bought our new house principally because of the physical amount of social space it has given us i.e. we do not have to have curious neighbours observing us from next door. The building may not have all the features we were looking for. For example, the stairs need some redesign and the garden (as always in mountain areas) wants some shoring up.  But the first box we needed to tick was precisely the one referring to social space and, interestingly, our visitors tend to come up with that point when they call on us. ‘Lucky! You don’t have nosey neighbours to contend with.’ ‘You’ve got your own space to do whatever you like’ and so forth.

To sum up. Holiday homes may be bought within prying distance of neighbours but as far as we are concerned the only spies we wish to see are deer, stoats badgers and boars (and not too many of those either).

By the way I forgot to add. Neighbours can, of course, be good or not so good. Of the not-so-good ones the worse neighbours have not so much been locals born-and-bred here but those from abroad who have decided to live here. And of these the worse like to call themselves ‘expats’ rather than immigrants. No need to guess from which country they come from. But then I have no wish to mention names…

Having shown my cards regarding neighbours and social space I remain quite sociable and, because we are now in a more isolated location, enjoy our interaction with other bipeds rather more than before. Here, for example are a few places we visited last Sunday. They included a very convivial gathering celebrating the grand Ducal road which connects Bagni di Lucca over the mountains with the Duchy of Modena with a folk-song group and Virgilio Contrucci enlightening us on the way this road, which passes through some of the most stunning landscapes, came to be.

 

And in the evening there was a captivating re-telling of Ovid’s metamorphosis of the Persephone legend staged before the gorgeous Romanesque façade of San Cassiano church as part of our local festival there.

Let us in the meanwhile continue to enjoy this summer before Hades return to the scene to capture Persephone, abduct her to the nether regions and cause winter to re-descend upon us.

(PS There must be a linguistic connection here for alter but one letter in the Italian word for Hell or Hades – where Persephone was abducted to – and ‘inferno’ changes to ‘inverno’ = winter.)