"Coincidenze", Tim Parks (Bompiani, 2014)

There are anecdotes - by observing the bureaucracy of queuing and train ticket-buying, and by comparing cafes in the private and public sectors, he comes to conclusions about Italians - e.g. Italian train prices (except for Interregionali and Intercity) depend only on distance. Commuter trains are packed and people like to talk. Italians are attached to their home town, the cafe where they're known. So they're propared to commute. He reports on the tactics of dealing with ticket inspectors - a form of street theatre. He lists the numerous ways of buying tickets of various types, the changing rules about their validity. Photography in stations isn't allowed.

When he goes south of Naples, he's pleased to see old-style carriages with compartments. He arrives hours late in Palermo because the male ticket-checker wants to give a female colleague a lift, and also because there are single-track lines. When he speaks Italian in Sicily, few suspect that he's English. The southerners tell him that once they leave, there's no going back.

He has seen in a book that the expansion of the rail network around 1900 coincides with the increase in reading - books remain on sale at most stations.

Also he's come to these conclustions about Italians -

• Ecco un sentimento italiano importante: mi comporto bene e ne pago le conseguenze. Sono un martire.
• Una delle caratteristiche chiave in Italia, che si revela in ogni aspetto della vita di tutti i giorni, è la disvoltura con la quale si considera la distanza fra ideale e reale. Travalica quella che noi grezzi anglosassoni chiamiamo ipocrisia. Semplicemente non coglie la contraddizione fra retorica e comportamento.
• Come sempre in Italia l'illegalità dichiarata della classe dirigente è un ottimo alibi per i piccoli trasgressori

There's history - The first Italian railway ran from Napoli to Portici in 1839. The system's expansion tied in with unification. Policies were political as much as economic - a mobile workforce helped with regional unemployment, etc. And a job on the railways was a job for life with good pensions. The Italians tried to emulate British and German railways (without the demand that those countries had). Italian engineers gained prestige. In 1905, during a depression, the system was nationalised (Italy being the first big country to do so). Efficiency peaked during Mussolini's time (a mixture of sticks and carrots) but by 1929 was already in decline because of another deprerssion. Electrification began early, because of a lack of coal. As roads expanded in the 50s, railways suffered. Students, the poor, commuters and tourists became the main users. By 1985 in real terms, tickets cost a third of what they were in 1900, and employee costs had gone up sixfold. By 2000, the number of employees had halved.

Pope Gregory XVI thought that trains weakened family ties and were unnatural.

He has a romantic view of local trains, though he knows that all life is there and that the passengers are all on a journey together. I've been to Varenna in the North by train, and also Santa Maria di Leuca in the deep south.