Leaving on a train (Part II)

If you missed Part I, please read it here for context. Curious about the name of this newsletter? Click here to find out what it means and how to pronounce it.

Traveling to Milan for school quickly became routine, although I’d be lying if I said we always went willingly. Sometimes, my brother and I put up quite a resistance. We left home for long stretches time after all, and stayed with host families - families with different habits, foods and house rules.

Looking back as an adult, I know it must have been difficult for the families to have an extra child or two on their hands. As a sensitive kid, I always tried to blend in and stay out of trouble, but from a child’s perspective I didn’t always feel fully welcomed or wanted - sometimes it was detected in the attitude of a host parent, or in something another child blurted out in a moment of frustration.

Still, I am grateful to those families and acknowledge it would have been easier for them to decline to host in the first place.

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The second class Intercity train cars were divided into compartments with 6 seats each. The hallway outside had small chairs folded against the wall, which could be pulled out by travelers who had not booked a seat in a compartment.

If all went smoothly, the trip on the Intercity took between 5.5 and 6 hours. You helped your siblings store the luggage on the rack above the seats, and settled in to wait for the train to pull out of Stazione Termini, the main station in Rome.

If there happened to be a train strike, well then you could be stuck on that train for 9 hours or more. Stranded travelers piled on to the one train that was active, by default turning it into the train that made all the local stops.

I remember one occasion in particular when the train was so crowded, we were unable to reach our reserved seats. We sat in the packed hallway on top of our bags for nine hours as people smoked cigarettes all around us.

Most of the time, the train ride was comfortable and uneventful.

We always packed food: a rosetta sandwich (rosette are roman bread rolls), sliced cucumbers, some cake, maybe some fruit. Most important was the reading material: my sister always made sure to purchase La Settimana Enigmistica, a weekly publication full of crosswords, rebus puzzles, interesting facts and jokes that were never that funny. We passed it around along with the comics and the occasional book we brought.

At one point we were so sophisticated, we started bringing small portable board games with magnetic parts. My brothers sometimes pored over the Quattroruote, an automotive magazine, for hours at a time.

We didn’t usually have the compartment to ourselves, and our travel companions would invariably ask about the cappellino (little hat) on my brothers’ heads. This would always lead to long conversations about our religion, why us crazy kids were travelling on our own, why we didn’t want their snacks but thank you, and much more.

On one trip, I met an American woman who was part Native American. She was happy to chat in English for hours and taught me how to draw Donald Duck, which is still the only comic character I can draw.

When the train stopped at a station, a hawker would often walk down the train hallways shouting: BIRRA COCA COLA PANINI BIRRA PANINI… (Beer, coke, sandwiches…) or: BIRRE, COCHE, , ARANCIATE PANINI… ((Beer, coke, Fanta/orange juice, sandwiches…) a refrain my siblings and I still hear playing in our minds.

The video linked here depicts a similar hawker at a concert -

Sometimes my sister would coordinate with her roommate and best friend to board the same train once we'd reached her city of Bologna, and she’d join us for the remainder of the trip. The friend once entered the compartment and offered us a Danish - I had no idea what it was, but she had recently returned from NY, or one of her parents had, and in NY bakeries they sold these things called danishes. The more you know!

Seen below, a photo I took of my brother wearing his cappellino on the train when I was in 8th grade.