It started as most great love stories do: with a good first impression.
Before I moved to Italy, I boarded my first Italian train from Milano Centrale to Venezia Santa Lucia, expecting little more than an efficient high-speed journey. Instead, I found myself completely besotted. Floor-level racks spared me the indignity of hoisting an oversized suitcase overhead. The seats were comfortable and fronted with a table, the ride was smooth, and the landscape was unforgivably cinematic, with flatlands giving way to the mountains. I even managed to catch a glimpse of Lake Garda. At every stop, I dutifully kept an eye on my suitcase, heeding the guidebook’s warning about opportunistic hop-on, hop-off luggage thieves. By the end of the journey, I was completely smitten.
Coming from New York, where my rail experience was largely limited to Metro-North and the occasional Amtrak Acela (which is anything but “high speed” by European standards), this felt like an entirely different category of travel. Over the following weeks, the trains carried me across Italy with such ease that each journey only deepened my affection. Then I returned to New York and assumed our affair would end there, as long-distance just wasn’t sustainable.
But the spark reignited when I eventually moved to Rome, and we managed to settle into an easy routine. Now, Milano Centrale was less than three hours away, quicker, all things considered, than flying, once you factored in airport security, boarding gates and the inevitable brush with existential despair induced by short-haul flights. Florence became an entirely reasonable day trip, as did Naples. And Venice was only ever an excuse away.
When I moved to Milan the following year, things took a more serious turn. The trains whisked me to Trieste, Ravenna, Trento, Faenza and Turin as well as on countless escapes to Liguria, the Adriatic, the Dolomites and the lakes. Places that had once seemed out of reach became reachable. And Venice was even closer.
