Creative Non-Fiction: Travel

This piece of travel writing appeared in Vagabond, May 2003.

Excerpt included below; full text available upon request.

Italian Railroads: Destination Unknown

An old joke runs that a European hell would consist of British cooks, French mechanics, German police, Swiss lovers, and the whole thing would be organized by the Italians. After three months spent studying in Florence, I must say that I concur on the Italian bit, at least where public transportation is concerned.

This past winter, I became intimately acquainted with the Italian train system. That is not to say I understood it, but merely that I spent a great deal of time riding on trains, waiting in train stations, racing through scenic Tuscan side streets toward said train stations, and being laughed at by Italian natives who simply could not understand why I seemed to encounter such difficulties whenever I ventured more than eight blocks from my host family’s apartment. The Italians, naturally, had the inside scoop on their own train system and seemed to have established a sort of peaceful coexistence with it. Or they had simply beaten it into submission. Either way, this understanding between the trains and their passengers is not extended to foreigners, who continue to find the entire arrangement a bit mystifying.

But before I recount what is by far my most memorable experience with the Italian train system, I must say a word in its defense. Because the truth is that, when all is said and done, I cannot really complain about the trains in Italy. I cannot complain about any form of transportation in Italy because, eventually, all performed their chief function: that is, to carry me someplace worth visiting. Regardless of whether I was taken to the place to which I had originally intended to travel, I quickly learned that there are no wrong destinations. Not in Italy.