Milan Central Station and Italian Night Trains

A view up the Via Vettor Pisani, toward the Milan Central Station.
Vettor Pisani was a medieval Venetian sea admiral who was very popular.
(Venice was one of the Italian city-state power centers.)

Eventually, I made my way back to the Milan Central Station to wait for the night train from Milan to Rome.  Fortunately, there were some stores in the Station.  I spent a lot of time browsing through shelves of books in Italian that I couldn't read and staring at bizarre Italian fashions.   Then I sat on a bench and watched Italians, which was kind of depressing.  It is very, very warm in Italy, as I may have mentioned before.  There are also lots and lots of homeless people.  As a result, there appeared to be people living on all of the grassy areas around station.  You literally couldn't have walked in a straight line across the grass anywhere around the station without stepping on somebody or their bags.  Loads of homeless people would also come and sit on all of the benches in the train station.  There were very few seats or benches in the station and I think that this was designed to try to limit homeless folks squatting in the terminals.  It did make it super inconvenient for folks who were waiting for trains.  For supper, I had something that was like a cross between a pizza hot-pocket and calzone at an outdoor kiosk, which wasn't too bad, and a gigantic bottle of water (it was really, really hot and thirsty work out there).

The very beautiful facade of the Milan Central Station.  I like the . . . Pegasus?  Pegasuses?  Pegasi? . . . winged horsies.

I went back to the train station a bit early for the train departure.  I was very hot and also very tired--I had gotten up  at 4 in the morning to catch the train, to get to another train, to get to the airport, to get to Milan.  I was also a bit worried about being able to find my way back because the the city was a bit confusing.  So I wandered around the station for a couple of hours.   The train was supposed to leave at a little after 10 pm.  However, as I walked around the station, I noticed that the departures/arrivals board had a lot of delays.  Then, my train got delayed.  Every half-an-hour or so, my train's estimated departure changed and the departure track changed three times.  I don't think that Italians are known as much for their strict punctuality and devotion to time-tables as the Dutch are.  My train eventually left after midnight.  One unfortunate aspect of waiting around all that extra time was having to use the restrooms.  They charged a couple of euros (a bit over $3) just to go in to them, which just seemed exorbitant.  One positive thing, while I was waiting, was that there was a Burger King in the station.  About midnight I was very hungry, and very bored, and I got a hamburger before I left, which was nice and homey and really hit the spot.

The interior of the station.  It is really beautiful in there and the ceilings were incredibly tall.

The night train was a really old model.  You had to sit in a little cubicle, with two facing bench seats that fit three across and were so close together that, when you sat across from someone, your knees touched.  It made for kind of a cramped nine hour trip.  Also (and I may have mentioned this before) it was very, very, very warm in the train.  I didn't take any pictures in the train so I thought that I would try to find a picture online, just to give you an idea of what they looked like.  However, when I looked up Italian night train pictures, there were loads (loads and loads!) of pictures of train wrecks, which I am glad that I didn't see before I took the trip!  I would have been extremely nervous, as well as hot, with a crick in my neck, and stiff knees.  I was in a little cubicle with five other people who, I gathered, were a married couple and their three adult/teenage daughters.  They were pleasant enough, but it sort of felt like I was crashing their party.  On the plus side, it was super cheap to take the train--it only cost about $55 dollars to take the night train, which meant (theoretically) that I got dropped in Rome at a super convenient time for my schedule and it also meant that I didn't have to pay for a hotel room and then waste a half-day traveling.

One of the exits from the Milan station.  Everything, but everything, was marbel.  Unfortunately, it was a bit dim in the station and my camera isn't very good, so all of my pictures were pretty blurry.

My very favorite person in all of Italy was the very kind, very helpful, pharmacist in one of the shops in the train station.  At about 10 pm Saturday night, I decided that dying from drug reactions as a result of translation errors was preferable to trying to survive through a whole week of allergy related misery.  Then that wonderful lady showed me which drugs were antihistamines and then told me how many pills to take when I came back five minutes later after I realized I couldn't read the directions in Italian.  I still don't know what I had an allergy to (or what drugs I took, or in what amounts, for that matter), but I was very, very grateful for those antihistamines.  They made all the difference in the world.  Now if only they had had anti-heat pills, it would have been perfect!