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The train trip is better for the environment. It is a pinnacle of slow travel movement. You can watch the world go while having an overview of a simpler life. It's cool. All valid considerations, but not what caused my long and long journey to European railways.
There were two main reasons: a healthy disgust for airports and to discover that Intrilla was always one thing. It was on a plane (irony) that we talked to an older couple who had just crossed Europe by train for the same price as a return from London to Manchester.
Interrail! I thought that a) he had been banned by Brexit, and b) it was the reserve of under 25. It turns out that none of these things are true. Start me back.
After the planning levels of Hannibal-Crossing-The-Telps, the trip went like this: London, Paris, Geneva, Milan, Modena, Bologna and Naples. And then Villa San Giovanni where the train is divided into two to go to Sicily – by Ferry. It is one of the last passenger trains to do it, and when I heard about it for the first time, it amazed me. Element of buckets list, even if reality has proven to be a little more municipal than the breathtaking.
So I went on a trip to chaotic stations, many trains, panic of occasional platform – and a lot of rail food. Things started badly. I generally avoid the offers on Eurostar after having endured their risotto porridge, but I have always found myself in possession of a cheese and a ham baguette if moist and impacted, it was leaned like a moss pillow. From this moment, however, each train opened a box of buffet-car delicacies.
There were menus of renowned chiefs. On the Geneva leg, “the best of French and Swiss products” came via Michel Roth (from the Bayview restaurant by Michelin from the city). In a modular coffee trolley with large plastic tables, it was impossible to withstand the Roth duck confit with Sarladaise potato in what looked like a glass jar with glass cover. Just the duck, the potatoes, the aromatics, the duck fat, the salt – not an additive in sight. In her scented and beige uniformity, she had a taste for real food, real cuisine, ringing with duck fat, rosemary and garlic.
Oh the glamor of the rapid Frecciarossa, in the course of Bologna in Naples, where the staff in a nasty uniform served as tiny sweet rolls filled with cheese and ham (like those you get in the procacci of Florence) directly to our luxurious seats. And the Moustachied ticket inspector looked like an idol in the morning. The famous chef here was Carlo Cracco from Italian MasterchefAnd there were hot dishes offered – black rice with Mazzancolle (large shrimps) with curry and cumin, maybe? – But I settled for a very good Crudo prosciutto served with fennel bread and a half-bottle of Fizz. And think that my train snacks in the United Kingdom are generally a Twix and a tea bag.
My favorite snack came from the Geneva leg in Milan, on a furnished train with this rarity, a complex dining car: a deep cup loaded with small smoked sausages, prevented from marinated pickles and onions and served with a mustard tube – any admiration for bald simplicity. I could have had a steak tartare or a wonderfully Swiss dish of macaroni garnished with chopped beef, fried onions, apple sauce and sbrinz cheese. But these little sausages, paradise. Three more hours on this train would not have been a chore, dreaming of my way through a dramatic landscape of mountains, lakes draped in a hazardous veil of smoke.
What other travel method offers such pleasure? It costs, for the entire trip, about £ 350 head – including Eurostar and the first class in Paris? This allows you to take advantage of a resort change in Paris to swim in beauty – and now, a fairly decent kitchen – blue train at Gare de Lyon. In Gawp to the food concessions of foreign stations: Hello, the Nachos submerged liquid cheese at the Bloody Bar in Geneva; Gamberini in Bologna and his petty buns filled with roasted eggplant; The designer Taralli with central Napoli. Then, to take an Arancino in a pleasantly coarse cafeteria while the train waits on a bridge below.
And – Hallelujah – When you stop in Modena, having marked a table at Osteria Francescana, one of the great restaurants in the world, you can drink. Fifty!
Next year, I plan to travel further north: Amsterdam, Munich, Vienna. . . This time, I will wrap more intelligently: the only drawback of the adventure was to raise large overwhelmed cases from the platform to the platform. I sincerely and trust that there will be sausages.
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