Wandering with Sam
Through the Alps by Rail
Sep 14, 2003, 10:41

Alpine Station.

In July 2002, I crossed the Alps on a Euro City train from Munich to Rome, a distance of about six hundred miles, ten hours by train. The most dramatic aspect of this journey was the transition from a cloudy, damp, and efficient Northern Europe to a hot, sunny, and laid back Southern Europe that adhered to the call of the afternoon siesta. The jagged Alps form a perpetual divide between these two zones.

The hauptbahnhof station.

After a brief stay in Munich, the livley capital city of Bavaria, I arrived at the Hauptbahnhof (main railway station) in the morning to board a train for Rome. This station was a huge nexus of transportation with dozens of trains departing or arriving every hour. These ranged from the fast (180 miles per hour plus), red and white ICE trains that connected Munich to other major cities in Germany to slower trains to regional cities or distant centers like Madrid or Rome.

The ICE to dortmund.

As I awaited the announcement for my train’s departure, I sat in a café near the platforms and sipped my typical morning beverage, kaffe mit milch (a latte) while watching the flow of people here. Nearby, a chain-smoking woman nursed her morning beer (after all, we are in Bavaria, where they take their beer seriously!).

Crowds of people milled about, some were in smart business suits carrying briefcases, while others were in shorts lugging around massive backpacks.

The hauptbahnhof.

Eventually my train was called and I grabbed my sizable rucksack and camera bag and waddled over to my train, wondering why I had brought a half dozen heavy books with me as my back strained from all that weight.

My train departed promptly at nine and was scheduled to arrive in Rome at seven that evening. Since the train wasn’t all that full, I had my own compartment. First the train slowly hit several switches as it exited the train station, then it picked up speed and flew past suburban S-Bahn platforms without slowing. Before long, the suburbs of Munich were behind us and the train was flying through wooded fields alongside a busy highway, a stretch of the famous Autobahn, with certain sections that still do not have a speed limit (unlike Montana).

The German autobahn.

As the train sped along at probably eighty or ninety miles an hour (a slow train by European standards), I watched the traffic on the highway that connected Germany to Italy. The outside lanes of this autobahn were filled with slow moving, brightly colored trucks from all over Europe while the inside lanes were used by much faster Audis, Mercedes, and BMW’s.

Unlike the United States, the majority of freight is moved by road in Europe, therefore Germany’s highways are generally clogged with a constant flow of slow moving trucks and tour buses with BMW’s, Porsches, and Mercedes flying past at speeds in excess of a hundred miles an hour, flashing their lights to clear the left lane while hoping they don’t round a corner to see a five kilometer Stau (traffic jam). Despite the insane combination of fast Porsches and slow trucks, Germany’s autobahns actually have a slightly lower rate of fatalities than U.S. interstates.

The train angled southwest through rolling hills and forests until Rosenheim, where it picked up the course of the swirling Inn River and followed it through the imposing dark peaks of the Austrian Alps with peaks exceeding 10,000 feet.

The train through Austria.

As the train gained elevation, the landscape shifted from a pastoral setting of sprawling farm villages around broad fields to much more compact towns of red roofed chalet style houses clustered around the tall spire of a parish church hedged in by looming ridges that led straight up to jagged mountain peaks. Periodically I saw the crumbling remains of a medieval fortress overlooking a village. Numerous streams cascaded down mountainsides to join swollen rivers like the Inn, which flowed just a few feet below the railroad right-of-way.

The Alps extend from eastern France and northern Italy across the southern fringe of Germany, totally engulfing Switzerland, much of Austria, Liechtenstein, and Slovenia.

The highest peaks in the Alps are along the border between France, Italy, and Switzerland; the Matterhorn and Mont Blanc are about 15,000 feet high. Further east, near Brenner Pass along the Austrian-Italian border, other peaks are twelve to thirteen thousand feet high. The passes across the Alps have been well-traveled routes through the course of history, like the Carthaginian general Hannibal’s expedition from Spain into Italy during the Second Punic War. In the first century B.C., Julius Caesar led his army north across the Alps to conquer parts of Gaul (modern France and Germany). Germanic plunderers and settlers of the late Roman Empire would follow these routes south into Italy to sack Rome and to gradually take over the Italian peninsula during the Volkerwanderung.

During the Middle Ages, pilgrims and German emperors would cross the various alpine passes on their way to Rome, the seat of the papacy. Einhart’s Life of Charlemagne details one such crossing in the year 800 when Charlemagne was crowned Holy Roman Emperor by the pope. Another famous adventure across the Alps was in 1077 when the Emperor Henry IV allegedly stood barefoot in the snow in penitence outside of Pope Gregory VII’s fortress at Canossa, Italy, after being excommunicated.

The train crested the Alps at Brenner Pass, a 4,500-foot high. After Brenner Pass, the Italian side of the Alps gradually shifted from heavily wooded steep slopes and jagged peaks to lower worn mountains towering over vineyards and towns of tightly packed red-roofed buildings illuminated by bright sunshine. Italian cities seemed to have a considerable number of tenement buildings adorned with drying laundry alongside the railroad tracks.

The communities along side the railway gradually shifted from German to Italian culture in the space of two hours. When I boarded the train in Munich, I felt totally immersed in my vague understanding of German culture, with the language, the fairly ordered landscape, the autobahn, and the alpine houses with their red roofs. I did not notice a transformation from Germany into Austria. However, at the Italian border, the signs were in both German and Italian and after Trento, the German language disappeared. And by Verona, the mountains also disappeared as the train entered the Po River Valley, a wide and flat expanse of rich farmland extending from Turin near the French border to the swampy shores of the upper Adriatic Sea near Venice and Ravenna.

As the train headed south into the more populated Po River Valley, I had to share my compartment with other passengers. The first guy to enter my compartment had all of his belongings stored in a plastic milk crate-like box. He did not speak English and I didn’t speak Italian, so we didn’t have much to say. After dozing off for a moment, I awoke only to find that my new companion had changed seats and was holding the handheld computer that I had left sitting on the seat across from me. He immediately set it down and moved back to his original seat. I had heard about how petty theft is a considerable risk in Italy, but I was certain that the stories were exaggerations. After that, I wasn’t so sure.

He then became interested in my empty Heineken beer can and wanted to know where he could get one (the entire conversation was gestures and futile attempts at communicating in our respective languages). Finally, I gave him five Euros, hoping that he would bring me back a Heineken as well. He didn’t; I never saw him again until he returned to retrieve his blue crate.

The Italians are certainly more than petty thieves, since I often had positive conversations with other people on trains.

They tended to be polite conversations that involved flattery and friendly chatting rather than brilliant or well-articulated technical or political discussions, since those require more effort than most travelers are willing to exert and have the potential of offending the people you’re stuck sitting next to for several hours. We were more interested in where each other lived, where they were going, or what they were studying than how United States policies might impact Europe and the world.

I shared a compartment with three women as we approached Rome; a nun from Bozano, an aerospace engineering student at a university in Rome, and an older German speaking woman, also from Bozano. Somehow I had convinced them that I was German because I had boarded the train in Munich (so I guess not all Americans stick out in such an obvious manner!) They knew little English, and I knew little Italian or German, so we communicated by drawing pictures and writing out sentences in my notebook. I said something about New York and drew a crude sketch of the Empire State Building; I couldn’t help adding a stick figure of King Kong ascending the side of the structure, which they had no trouble understanding.

A trailer train.

The final segment of the journey was through Tuscany between Florence and Rome. The train passed through frequent tunnels and rolling hills dotted with occasional stands of trees and medieval brick structures.

The beige fields of grain contrasted with bright green fields of grass and sunflowers. The harvested wheat fields were adorned with round bundles of hay, as they probably have been for centuries. The rivers were much lower and the land was much dryer than in Germany or Austria. We briefly stopped in Florence, a fairly well preserved city from the Renaissance. The pause to shift locomotives was long enough to tempt me to make a dash for the city center so I could take a picture of its famous fifteenth century cathedral, but brief enough that the slightest distraction would leave me stranded without my bags.

The arrival in Rome was signified by an increased number of tenements adorned with laundry. Even though Rome had a population in excess of three million people, the transformation from the rustic hills to the center of the city was fairly quick, probably because European cities tend to be much more compact than their North American counterparts. As the train pulled into Termini, the Roman train station, I could see the crumbling third century Aurelian Wall (and parts of the much older Severan Wall) in the shadow of the fading evening sun. The transalpine trek was over, and now I had to figure out how to link up with my fellow Portland State classmates in a city that was the center of western civilization two thousand years ago.

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