The Green Mile

Before I headed out to Milan, I looked around for books on the network. Sadly, there didn't seem to be any, or at least none in English, and I didn't have time for a crash course in Italian. I finally found Italian Ways: On and Off The Rails From Milan to Palermo, by Tim Parks, but I didn't enjoy it. Parks is a resident of Northern Italy and the book catalogues a series of rail journeys he'd taken over the years, but it came off as somewhat patronising to me. What he enjoyed, on his trips around the nation, was when the service was chaotic, when the trains were a mess or broke down, when the staff were rude. When high-speed services with new electric trains are introduced, he grumbles about their efficiency and their seat reservations; when Milano Centrale is rebuilt and modernised, he complains that it has lost all the charm it had when he got his bag stolen and you'd be accosted by random panhandlers. It's a very middle class English attitude, that the Continent should be a bit…