One of my lockdown reads was “How Bad Are Bananas?: The carbon footprint of everything” by Mike Berners Lee. If you have not come across it, it is an excellent read and thoroughly recommended. It served, mainly, to confirm my place in Hell on account of the flights I have taken in the last few years… But all that is a topic for another occasion.
Suffice to say, that for several years now, nudged by various sources, I have been meaning to look more closely at train travel to Sicily. In the end though, it was not being wracked by a guilty consience, but my dentist who corralled me into action.
I was due for a dental treatment, after which – my dentist warned me in advance – I ought not fly for a couple of weeks.
The journey from Cambridge to Milazzo (or vice versa), by plane from Gatwick, Stansted or Luton to Catania or Palermo is one I make frequently and it never takes less than 12 hours (in either direction), whichever way I do it. I am rarely able to work effectively and the day is written off and designated in my diary as a “reading day”. But travelling by train is an appealing alternative as the extra elbow room and table space more readily aids the workflow.
I quickly found there were multiple ways to organise a train journey from London to Sicily. There is plentiful advice on the website “The man in seat 61”: https://www.seat61.com/Italy.htm but everyone’s circumstances are different and how you eventually plan your journey will depend on a multitude of factors.
If you live in the capital and are able to get the first Eurostar out of London in the morning, it is possible to be in Milan in time for dinner. Or rather, it was until the landslide of August last year which closed the route from Paris to Milan via Modane and has since made the journey more difficult.
Eurostar prices escalate as the morning goes on, so unless you are on one of the first trains in the morning, it can be expensive. It turned out cheaper for me to get an evening departure from St Pancras – one that I could be sure of catching – and spend the first night in Paris than spend the night in London and strike out early from there.
After that, the choice was to get the overnight Intercity from Milan down to Sicily, or stay the night in Milan and wait until the following morning. I was mindful not to pack my changeovers too tight and risk losing the connection if I was held up in a delay.
The overnight or daytime Intercity from Milan (or Turin) to either Palermo or Syracusa (the train splits at Messina) is the most popular option for this leg of the journey, but though the train traversing the Straits of Messina might hold a romantic appeal for many, for me the idea was much less appealing. My reasons were several:
1) Gone are my days of sharing a couchette with another 5 strangers, and travelling alone, the cost of a single couchette is way beyond the price of an Airbnb in Milan.
2) I wanted to work on this journey and good internet (as is available on the Frecciarossa) was essential.
3) I knew from experience that crossing the Straits of Messina as a foot passenger on a ferry or hydrofoil is many times quicker than waiting for the train to be shunted onto the ferry and you can save at least an hour in this way.
It was my first ever journey on the Eurostar to the continent and I celebrated by feasting on the picnic of cheese and fruit I had brought from home. I had barely got through my stash of tangerines when the train drew into Paris around 9:30 in the evening.
Happy to stretch my legs, I was thankful for the forty-minutes walk to my hotel down by the Gare de Lyon. Had I been in holiday mode I might have stopped on the way for a meal or a glass of wine, but as it was, I just grabbed a beer and a bag of crisps from a corner shop. Arriving at my hotel, I was tired and just went straight to bed. I was looking forward to the following day and arriving in Italy by train.
At the Gare de Lyon, I dusted off my school-French to order a coffee and a croissant and to get myself a baguette for lunch. It was not yet eight o’clock but the station was packed: it was the beginning of a school holiday apparently.
My seat on the on the top deck of the two-tier train was comfortable enough. I took out my laptop and logged into the Oiugo wifi portal, forking out the €3 for the unlimited data package. To my annoyance though, the wifi didn’t work well: it was tediously slow and the connection dropped frequently to the point of being unusable. I tried to maintain my optimism that the service would improve, but after an hour or so I gave up. With so much that one needs on the cloud, working without internet is just too frustrating.
By the time I arrived in Nice, I had had enough of this journey. A “trois fromage” sandwich did little to buoy my spirits: its wooden bread and tasteless, buttery cheese was not as mouth-watering as it had looked on the counter. I was mindful that Giuseppe Garibaldi had been born in Nice and indeed, the station was opened during his lifetime (1864). I have no idea whether he ever saw the station, but I chided myself with the thought he would undoubtedly have been more appreciative of the “trois fromage” sandwich.
The forty kilometre train ride from Nice to Ventimiglia took almost an hour with the train stopping a dozen times en route. The scenery was pleasing enough, but there is a limit to the number of yacht harbours one is invited to admire en route.
I had an hour and half to kill in Ventimiglia. I took a stroll around this historic and pleasing town and then sat down for a beer to raise my spirits. It had the desired effect and I boarded the train for Milan feeling refreshed. I had the carriage to myself and four seats to spread out on. But my luxury was short-lived. At San Remo, half of Italy clambered on board. I had forgotten that today was the last day of the music festival. And after that, the four hour journey to Milan was accompanied by the chatter of theatre and celebrity gossip among the excited Milanese high-society women. It was painless enough, but by the time I arrived in Milan, I was hungry and glad to be rid of the train for the day.
My spirits lifted when I found my small B&B was next to a Turkish restaurant. I dumped my bags and went straight to the somewhat unimaginatively named “Turkish Direzionale Bar-Kebap”. Having struggled with French most of the day, I was pleased to be able to jabber away to the waiting staff in Turkish. An Adana kebab and bottle of Moretti was just the fix I needed to forget about the frustrations of Oiugo “oui-fi” – or perhaps more correctly “non-fi“.
The following morning, with the train not set to depart until 9am and only being 10 minutes walk from the station, I allowed myself the luxury of a sit-down croissant and coffee in the fabulous Bistrot Pedol located right under the Stazione Centrale. In a huge warehouse-like space, in what was evidently, in the evenings, a fine-dining restaurant, the bar served excellent coffee and croissants. Then, still with time to spare and ignoring the guilt of plastic containers, from the Carrefour next door I sourced a picnic salad and a bottle of San Pellegrino for the onward journey .
On the Frecciarossa, I was cheered to find the internet worked perfectly – and indeed continued to do so for the duration of my journey. The only annoyance was a character further down the carriage, possessed of a voice like a tumble-drier which even my noise-cancelling headphones failed to supress who used the journey to conduct non-stop zoom calls discussing the projected installation of an intranet – the details of which I knew all too intimately by the time he fortuitously got off the train at Naples.
I managed to work almost non-stop – at least nine out of the ten hours of the journey – and by the time I got off the train at Villa San Giovanni, I felt a sense of triumph at my day’s output.
Furthermore, within ten minutes, I was on the hydrofoil bound for Messina: a short twenty minute hop across the Straits. And at the station piazza in Messina, there was even time for a celebratory Birra dello Stretto before I boarded the bus for Milazzo. Today at least, had been a successful day.
All in all, the journey that usually takes me 12 hours by plane, had taken me two and a half days and had cost me at least three times as much: two-fifths of which was on accommodation. (Perhaps if you have a travel companion, the expense of this could be shared?)
It had been a fun experience. Would I do it again? If time and money were no obstacle, I might well. But in the midst of a working routine, the expense in both time and money would be difficult to justify. Did I feel virtuous about the low-carbon footprint of my journey? Shamefully, by the time I stepped through the door in Milazzo, I had long-forgotten that this was ever one of my objectives.
But, on the other hand, the experience had been infectious. It did make me wish I had limitless time and budget to swan through Europe on trains. At eighteen, and fresh out of school, as my peers went off inter-railing, I had taken a summer job and worked through the vacation. Inter-railing had seemed like a luxury I couldn’t afford – either in time or money. Forty years later, nothing much has changed…
But perhaps therein lies the lesson – from which I am evidently still to learn…
I have broken down my costs as below in the case they might help someone inspired by my journey do the same:
Journey | Time | Cost (£) | |
London -> Paris | 2h 30m | £74 | |
Paris -> Milan | £104 | ||
Paris -> Nice €82.00) | 5h 30m | ||
Nice -> Ventimiglia (€9.20) | 1h | ||
Ventimiglia -> Milan (€19.90) | 4h | ||
Milan -> Villa S. Giovanni | 10h | £44 | |
Villa S. Giovanni -> Messina | 30m | £3 | |
Paris Hotel | £78 | ||
Paris city tax | £5 | ||
Milan Hotel | £62 | ||
Milan city tax | £4 | ||
TOTAL: | £374 |