IV.xii. Terra Firma

"The traveler who has gone to Italy to study the tactile values of Giotto, or the corruption of the Papacy, may return remembering nothing but the blue sky and the men and women who live under it."
- E.M. Forster

Four hours after getting home from the previous night's adventures Alaric and I were on a train northward to Padua, Italy's second university town. We had arrived at this point not without difficulty, though surprisingly this was not due to our lack of sleep, but rather the workings of Italian public transport.
    Trains in Italy run under the brilliant guidance of Trenitalia, a massive state-owned entity that employs twice as many personnel per mile of track than its French equivalent. Trenitalia, it is true, allows for very cheap travel throughout the country, but beyond that the corporation is plagued with problems. As should be expected, the trains in Italy are organized into overly complex categories. The cheapest trains are of the Regionale and Interegionale classes (interestingly, these trains are similar, in name only, to the Swiss Interegio, an attempt at a name which makes sense in all four Helvetian official languages, but ends up meaning nothing in any of them). These sorts of trains stop at all stations, and more often than not seem to be waiting on some obscure siding for a faster, more expensive train to pass. Not wanting to upset the passengers, in such cases the conductors also take care not to go underway immediately after the faster train has passed, thereby disguising their scheduled inferiority by waiting even longer than necessary. People would rather be late than play second fiddle to some speeding bullet for businessman.
    Then there are the Intercity trains, named in English perhaps to give a greater impression of speed, which are quite expensive but sometimes the only option. They are usually divided into cabins. Sometimes black and white photographs of Italy's monuments hang in old frames that rattle constantly over the nation's decrepit tracks.
    The Eurostar, Italy's ponderous, unreliable answer to the TGV, makes for a somewhat better choice, provided that one has the money to ride it. The Eurostar is approximately three times as expensive per kilometer as the bottom of the line Regionale and Interegionale trains. Annoyingly, it and the Intercity require reservations most of the time, which causes additional complications when working with the bright yellow automatic ticket machines that form the most dependable link in the chain. With the advent of these machines, of course, no ticket agents were laid off, so buying tickets manually or electronically has never been easier. The machines usually function quite well, but just the other day as Alaric and I were purchasing our tickets to go to Padua one of the machines swallowed a twenty Euro bill and then promptly displayed a bright red "out of order" screen. As our train was leaving in four minutes, I despaired over both reaching Padua that morning and retrieving my French friend's twenty. "You, stay here," I commanded Alaric, taking charge of the situation in a way I could never have done three months ago. I marched over to a manned ticket booth, waited in line for a moment, then demanded that the Trenitalia employee I was dealing with refund my friend's money. I pointed angrily at the machine. She was about to refuse, but at that very moment a technician pushed Alaric away from the thieving machine he was guarding and began to repair it. Three minutes to train time. With uncharacteristic speed the machine was fixed, and the gruffly expeditious technician proceeded to confirm that yes, indeed, we were owed twenty Euros minus the cost of a ticket to Padua. Two minutes. I cringed at the thought of the forms I would have to fill out, then and there, in order to get the refund. I slid my hand through opening in the window to retrieve the forms, but I was overjoyed to find a ticket to Padua and change instead. We rushed to the train and, on time for once, we were off. In Italy, there's always a way.

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    We didn't have any particular business in Padua, except that we had arranged to meet friends of ours from Slovenia in front of the Scrovegni Chapel that morning. Naturally, we had to do our best to keep up with our exotic troop of European friends, lest we loose contact with them and thus appear even less continental. I suppose this is less of a problem for Alaric, with his slight French accent, than it is for me. Nevertheless, we met up with Marko and Jernej as we were looking at a bust of Perlasca, an Italian war hero who, in the closing days of World War Two, faked being the Spanish Ambassador to Budapest in order to safeguard Jews from the Nazi occupiers. A film was made about this saga a few years ago, but Italians seemed to prefer romantic comedies and dramas to stories of Garibaldian heroes.
    We walked into town with the Slovenians (I refer to them jokingly as Yugoslavs). In all seriousness, the friends I meet abroad are very important to me. I usually don't even bother making friends with uninteresting or ordinary people, so that those I am attached to are all the more valuable. I also hold a theory in the back of my mind that, along with most of my ideas, I have probably abstracted in order to make sense of a chaotic world. Still, I believe that despite the millions of disparate people throughout the world one can never hope to meet, it is always possible to come across the right ones. It is only a matter of placing yourself right, and recognizing genuine connections when they come your way. Life is a Ven diagram of acquaintances; one's experiences are always coloured by other circles.
    Having rendez-vous'd in Padua, the four of us found that we didn't actually have that much to do with ourselves. My three companions, like most of the world, can't take as much art as I can in a day, so we contented ourselves to wandering the streets and making the occasional stop in a café. Marko Jokingly said that he'd let me know if he felt any art cravings. Regardless, we still made sure to visit Giotto's frescoes in the Scrovegni chapel, which I repeatedly stressed as being at least equal in importance to the Sistine Chapel, if not far greater. I was disappointed, however, when after fifteen minutes a guardian ushered us out; time restraints have become the norm in such glorious yet cramped places.
    Far more unexpected than the dazzling blue skies and monumental humanity of the chapel was another altogether different display of spirituality in Padua. In the centre of town, not far from the famed café Pedrocchi, a live action nativity scene was being presented.
    We convinced the Slovenians to drive us to Venice before returning home. Marko had a car, a two-door Renault Clio, and we intended to take full advantage of it. We were deposited in Piazzale Roma, the hideous automotive incursion into Venice, at about eight thirty, and we left on the midnight train back to Bologna. Our few hours in the city were serene and magical, the season and time of day lending the place an even more theatrical backdrop than normal. We waxed eloquent, two failed orators, about the tides of Venetian fortune. I reminded Alaric that four hundred years ago, at the height of the Republic's naval supremacy, the Arsenal was able to construct an entire war galley in the time it took Henri IV of France, visiting as a dignitary, to attend a state dinner.
    Saint Mark's square was empty, populated only by the stacks of platforms kept handy for the acque alte that are prone to happen this time of year. Even the famous pigeons that delinquent Italian school kids use to their advantage by throwing seeds at a chosen victim, thus swarming him or her with birds, were absent. The chords of Don't Look Back in Anger were floating over the square from the piano bar at the Hotel Gritti Palace as we left to catch our train. A last droning ballad for a dead city.