Italian connections: not as easy as you might think

The Man Who Pays His Way: A minor miracle along the railroad to Florence

Destination unknown: Italian passenger train approaching Sarzana, close to the Ligurian coast (Simon Calder)

Simon Calder, also known as The Man Who Pays His Way, has been writing about travel for The Independent since 1994. In his weekly opinion column, he explores a key travel issue – and what it means for you.

Haphazard at worst, magical at best: that sums up my experience of Italian railways over the past week.

I have had the pleasure of exploring Italy on regional trains. My policy is to avoid the expresses that speed the length and breadth of the nation: they spend too much time in tunnels and, when they emerge, turn the scenery into a high-speed blur – a shame, for such a beautiful country.

The traveller certainly needs to be relaxed about time, since punctuality is not the greatest strength of Trenitalia, Italian state railways.

All the trains I caught ran late – apart from the one I didn’t catch because it departed early.

Much of the line along the north coast of Sicily is single track. At the small beach resort of Brolo, an eastbound train must idle at platform 1 and await its westbound counterpart arriving on platform 2. That, at least, is the theory. Knowing this, when I saw my intended train to Messina already in, I ambled certain in the knowledge that it had to wait for its opposite number to turn up.

“Beep – beep – beep”: the doors slammed shut and, press as I might on the unyielding button, the driver had other ideas. He was leaving a couple of minutes early. A helpful westbound passenger told me the next train was so delayed that he believed he could get to the next station along and meet it there – therefore avoiding his train running late.

To cut a long afternoon short, I shared some conversation with a Sicilian Australian named (by his pals in Brolo) “Mister Vince”. Then, with no train scheduled for the next three hours, I hitched a lift with an Algerian tourist.

No autostrada for him. “I will only be here once, so I am going to make the most of it,” he said as we swerved around every hairpin bend of the old highway, which follows the contours of the coastal range. Even the train does not deliver such spectacular views.

Later that same week, some Parma karma took effect. From the spiritual home of prosciutto, I was heading to Sarzana – one of those idyllic Italian towns off the tourism radar but worth a day of anyone’s life.

The journey was simple on paper (and on the excellent Trenitalia app). From Parma (where, quaintly, all visitors spending a euro visiting the loo on platform 1 are given a handwritten receipt) the train would thread through the mountains to Pontremoli – a town whose name means “trembling bridge” – and, six minutes later, a connecting service would depart for Sarzana and Florence.

What could possibly go wrong? Well, of course the train left late and fell further behind schedule. A crackly public address announcement mentioned “Firenze”. I asked a fellow passenger to decipher, expecting her to say: “They won’t hold the Florence train so we have to wait an hour or two for the next one.”

Amazingly, she said instead: “This train will follow the first one all the way to Florence. All you have to do is stay on board and you will get to your destination perhaps 15 or 20 minutes late.”

And so it proved: instead of terminating at Pontremoli, the train and its crew pressed on, dropping off passengers along the way.

Who knows the logistical and financial cost of such a superb piece of customer service? I asked Mark Smith, the international rail travel guru who runs the Seat61.com website, if this was standard practice in Italy.

“Strange indeed – it’s not something I’d expect or have come across before,” he said.

I’ll put it down as a minor miracle and pray that your next Italian rail trip is né tardi né presto: neither late nor early.