italy story

Minding the gap, I pull myself aboard, struggle through sliding doors as they close, and shimmy onto the platform. I ping-pong from wall to wall toward the next seat. Boarding trains with a forty-five pound pack is like playing human pinball. The advantage to train travel may be its ease—the conductors and crew appear to do all the work—but for a novice traveler, things are never as easy as they seem.

To my credit, I maneuver clear of fellow passengers—or they from me—flop my pack onto an empty seat, and slide across to the adjacent bench. With considerably less exertion, other riders take their seats too: scruffy olive-skinned men in slacks and open-chested flannels, women cradling the fixings for tonight’s pesto surprise, and a couple of intellectuals with noses buried in books. Everyone looks tired. It could be the weather; I’ve never known somewhere so humid. Where else can one make small talk like: ‘looks like another sweaty day.’ I’m melting, and maybe everyone else is too. Or perhaps everyone is aggravated at this American and his bulky pack—he’s certainly tired of it—filling an entire seat and muttering to himself in some foreign dialect.

Unfortunately, a foreign dialect is all I know, and—where’s my rail pass? As inconspicuously as possible, I frantically leaf through the many pockets of my Lowe Alpine Sirroco Classic® pack, ruing the day that I appraised an abundance of pockets as a convenience. The pleasant Seattle A giant oversight if you ask me. I could be lost somewhere in the Tibetan highlands, mind a bit fuzzy from the altitude, wasting my last breaths in futile pursuit of an oxygen mask locked far away in some forgotten pocket, or, worse yet, I could be missing my rail pass! Where is it? salesman said nothing about the inconvenience of something so convenient.

I’ve been riding the rails in Europe for a few months now. I first arrived in London with a group of university students from a small liberal arts college in Washington State. We toured Great Britain together, sharing our meals, lives, and love/hate relationships with Arthurian lit. And now I find myself prancing about Italy like a suddenly self-aware Don Quixote, a foolish spectacle for all to see. If my rail pass is lost, it might finally be time to doff the cap of traveler extraordinaire and face the facts. The carefree young man who left Seattle planned to embrace every little cultural unpleasantry with easygoing acceptance. No complaining, and most certainly no whining. I obviously didn’t anticipate this. Really, it’s unfathomable that a middle-class, white boy from the suburbs could expect to seamlessly blend into his surroundings and float effortlessly from place to place.

“Tickets please! Tickets,” hollers a voice in my mind. I’m convinced that any minute a train conductor will burst through the doors of our car with armed guards in tow. On the morning train from Switzerland, the train staff even searched some bags and checked our passports. Tossing shorts, socks, and underwear out of the way, I dig deeper. Hopefully, every Italian city is equipped with a friendly neighborhood US embassy. Although…I could probably write a darn good travel essay from a dank prison cell in Timbuktu, Italy.

The train is rumbling now, but still no onboard announcements or any sign of a conductor (or a rail pass). Groaning, the train flexes its tired mechanical muscles and jettisons forth from the station. Saying a quick prayer, I realize that if necessary I can probably purchase a ticket onboard. Besides, the other passengers, pretending to ignore my antics, have no tickets in hand ready for collection. I sit back and concentrate on the movement of the train, but its faded caramel seats, jarring motion, and cranky grinding of gears conjure unpleasant images of rickety old roller-coasters. Unconsciously, I reach for a lap bar and wonder uneasily if trains cave to the same barometric conditions as humans. Might our car suffer heat stroke and leave me stranded in Genoa?

But the train keeps going. And stopping. And going. And stopping, stopping at every little space in the tracks wide enough to accommodate a few benches of worn commuters. There! Beyond the benches and stucco high-rise apartments I can see thin strands of beach. With any luck, that’s the Mediterranean. But as each fresh likeness of tropical paradise rolls slowly by, the city names elicit no sense of familiarity. Still, these towns look nice. I could cut loose from my itinerary, barrel blindly from the seasoned advice of other travelers, and land myself in some obscure Italian village no one’s ever heard of, besides the Italians, of course. Some ordinary coastal community sifting wages from the sea rather than the wallets of tourists. Rent a raft and float away into the Mediterranean sunset…but seriously, maybe this is the wrong train. I ask a few passengers.

“To Vernazza?” I ask. “Vernazza?” And point to the train.

Someone says the word for floor. Others shake their heads. One woman, obliging this strange foreigner, takes the lead, and offers me a helpful bundle of insight. Unfortunately, the rushing wind carries her words far away to the opposite end of our car. While Italy seems privileged to have experienced parts of the industrial revolution, like this train putting deliberately down the sun-soaked coast, other modern conveniences apparently have bypassed Europe’s boot. Despite the pressing humidity, Italians on the West Coast lack the crucial life support system we know as air conditioning. Thankfully, my train utilizes the predecessor to AC: wide-open windows. But in the context of conversations, Italian AC makes communication nearly impossible. Oh, well, her insight amounted to nothing more than Italian gibberish anyway.

“Prego?” I ask. I’ve often been told that when in Rome, do as the Romans do; in this case that means speak Italian. Earlier, as I crossed the border from Switzerland, a benevolent tour guide explained that the word “prego” serves at least a million functions, ranging from “may I take this,” “you’re welcome,” and “excuse me,” to a brand of spaghetti sauce. Thus, if lost for something to say in Italy, like now, “prego” might work. It does. She repeats her explanation. Great. I muster one last try, putting careful emphasis on each of the syllables. “Verrrr nahhhzzzzz uhhh?”

“Si, si.” So much for blending in. After a few “graci’s,” my bag and I ride the remainder of the trip in self-conscious silence. Cover blown, I discard any pretense of acting indigenous and pull dog-eared pages from a used copy of Rick Steves’s Best of Europe 2001. Staring at the map, I note how close Vernazza should be to Genoa. Barely a centimeter! Oh, well. I stash the map in the front pocket of my shorts with a camera, some German receipts, and a rail pass. A rail pass?! Hallelujah! I nearly jump out of my seat. My Italian train-mates must think I’m loony, or perhaps I’m behaving like a typical American. No wonder we have such a poor reputation abroad. After daring a last glance at my fellow passengers, I turn my gaze to the window and stare at the passing towns—in part to avoid further eye contact with the locals but more importantly to somehow verify that, yes, I am on the right train.