The Italian Job

Is the size of the suitcases that turn up at St Pancras at the crack of dawn a suggestion that some of their owners have done a Great Rail Journey before? There is certainly a lot of lugging and lifting to be done, but, of course, it’s well worth the effort.

I first enjoyed Paris as a teenager in 1966. It smelt so different from anything I’d experienced before - garlic, Gauloises and drains. Then there were all those little green buses and the urinals where you were protected from public gaze by a cast iron curtain, whilst your feet and head were still on full view from outside. The area around Gare du Nord station today is depressing and it still stinks of wee and is prone to pick-pocketing. Shanty towns of camping tents provide shelter for immigrants under a former overhead railway route, their only obvious “luxury” being someone else’s discarded mattress. There seemed to be even more people here than at the same time last year, both times viewed from the coach as it crawled between traffic lights whilst transferring us to Gare de Lyon. One wonders what life must have been like previously to want to swap it for this sort of existence. The expectation of a better future must have been so much greater than this grim reality.

We didn’t exactly tear around the streets of Turin at breakneck speed, either, though the Metro certainly whisked us into the city very efficiently from our hotel, which was based in the former Fiat car factory. It still has the test track on the roof, though sadly both it and the roof garden were out of bounds on the day we were there. Turin was interesting, especially the area around the Roman gateway. It’s easy to forget how good the Romans were with bricks.

Then on to Liguria and our base in Chiavari at the excellent Monterosa hotel. As with all of the towns along the Italian Riviera, the buildings have a sense of permanence, as if they’ve been there for ever. They are all arranged in their grid iron pattern and decorated in various pastel shades, separated from each other by hefty stone paving blocks in the narrow passage ways, that must also create maximum shade from the summer sun.

The long-established market towns and service centres discovered tourism to add to traditional farming, fishing and boat building. The resulting string of settlements is linked together with a regular and reliable rail network run by Trenitalia, which we sampled a number of times as we explored the congested coastal strip that takes you through the series of short tunnels that cut through the frequent promontories that separate the limited flatter sections where streams and larger, managed flood channels enter the sea. The beaches were grey and stoney, but there was so much else of interest that unless a bucket and spade were the first things you packed, you would be well catered for, starting with local food delicacies, with pasta in all its forms, along with seafood, pesto and the olive oil based local breads like focaccia.

We began to wonder what they’ve done with all their birds. As keen twitchers back home, we were hoping for a bit more variety than we were used to but some late departing swallows were all we saw of the autumn migration, though we did pick up firecrest and short-toed tree creeper on the Merlin bird app. Perhaps they shoot birds more energetically over here. The lack of birds was made up for, instead, by plenty of innocuous but persistent and bothersome flies. The few mosquitos around were so glad to see us they could hardly wait to get up close and personal, while the noisy cicadas on the trees along the walkway to the station kept a more respectful distance.  

I’m always up for a boat trip, but the trip to Portofino to pay homage to the playground of the rich, with oodles of accompanying name dropping, was a less pleasant experience than wandering along the waterfront and harbourside at the much more relaxed resort of Comogli. Chiavari’s own seaside was a bit of a disappointment in part, as a concrete wall cut off the sea view close to the centre. You had to walk the promenade a good way along to the west, to find rock armour breakwaters that were having only limited success in trapping more grey beach material. However, the Saturday night revellers amongst the bars and restaurants here were having a great time at the waterfront.

The Cinque Terra villages clinging to the hillsides were very pretty when viewed from the water. The steep wooded slopes behind the settlements had been cleared, terraced and farmed for centuries, fearing visits from pirates for much of that time but today more worried about drought, flash floods and soil erosion. This area is very picturesque and rightly provides the illustrations for the travel literature that was instrumental in attracting our attention to the area in the first place. It’s a unique and distinctive landscape that I’m glad to have seen first-hand.

By contrast, nearby Genoa is a substantial working port, where tourists can enjoy the noise and fumes from the overhead motorway as they take lunch on the extensive waterfront strip, opposite the cruise ships all lined up at the jetties on the other side of the wide harbour.

The journey home on the French TGV in bright sunshine was a highlight for me. Watching the landscape change from the attractive pan-tiled farms and vineyards of Provence, through the parched and tangled garrigue around Avignon and the more comforting rolling countryside on the way back to Paris was a pleasure in itself. The riding quality of these modern express passenger trains at such high speeds is also admirably smooth.

From the poet who saved St Pancras to the Mediterranean, we were back again to a poem remembered on a wall at King’s Cross, and all within a week. We certainly packed a lot of memorable experiences into a relatively short time. Train travel is the way to go, for me, as it was for both Betjeman and Larkin. So, “as we raced across bright knots of rail”, I look forward to the next time that I can do exactly that. We had a great time, so thanks to the organisers, our enthusiastic guide and to all our travelling companions.