hidden europe 49

South to Sicily

by Nicky Gardner

Picture above: Fish is a staple in the local diet, and you'll find a fabulous choice of seafood in the markets of Siracusa, Sicily (phooto © Presse750 / dreamstime.com).

Summary

The latest book from hidden europe editors Nicky Gardner and Susanne Kries is Europe by Rail. Catch the flavour of this new edition with our train journey from Rome to Sicily, specially adapted from the book for this issue of the magazine.

Is it not extraordinary how some travel trends persist over centuries? In the heyday of the Grand Tour, privileged travellers from northern Europe headed south in their thousands to Naples, but very few ever went far beyond. That’s still largely true today.

In the 18th and 19th centuries the city of Naples, although raucous and scruffy, tugged irresistibly on the north European imagination — and it still does today. The French poet and librettist Auguste Creuzé de Lesser had words for the city. “Europe ends at Naples — and it ends there quite badly,” he wrote 200 years ago. Naples has tidied itself up, but not completely. The noise and bustle of the city is complemented by the dramatic landscapes of the Sorrento Peninsula and the islands of Ischia and Capri, with the entire ensemble presided over by temperamental Vesuvius which still spits at intervals.

Our journey takes in these Neapolitan staples to be sure, but the real appeal of this route lies beyond Naples. This is a journey which ventures past the point where most rail travellers visiting Italy turn round and head back home. It gives a taste of the fiery harsh lands of Basilicata and it takes in a great sweep of the Calabrian coast. This is one of Europe’s finest coastal rail journeys.

Our journey south includes a short hop on a ferry from Villa San Giovanni, at the toe of the Italian mainland, to the Sicilian port of Messina. Five trains each day are shunted onto ferries for the crossing over the Strait of Messina. The endgame is Sicily, the largest island in the Mediterranean (just beating Sardinia to that record). Successive invasions by Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Normans, French and Spanish have shaped the Sicilian character; the land is a strange mixture of fertile plains, volcanic lava fields and rocky desert, while Mount Etna, the great volcano, is omnipresent, smoking in the background.

South to Naples

Our route starts in Rome and follows the main line from the Italian capital via Formia to Naples. This railway was conceived as a pioneering experiment in high-speed travel. So tortuous and slow was the old inland route through Cassino (which is still used) that a new line closer to the coast was completed in 1927. Nowadays, the high-speed trains use an even newer line which opened in 2005, but we think the Formia route is the best prelude to this Sicilian adventure.

This is just an excerpt. The full text of this article is not yet available to members with online access to hidden europe. Of course you can read the full article in the print edition of hidden europe 49.
Related article

The Tyre Man

With the unreliability of the very first cars, motoring was a stop-go process. Bibendum, the remarkable tyre man from Michelin, was always on hand to give advice in the event of breakdown or an enforced overnight stay.