to Tuscany, by train: part 1
on taking the slow road, to think
When I was 21, I moved to Canada; student visas were easy to come by and I went without contacts, a place to live or any potential job. My grandmother, the one on my dad’s side, was fretting hugely when I went to say goodbye; it’s not that far, I told her, and if all goes wrong I do have a flight home. She said this to me: you have to realise, Heather, that when I was your age I went to London on the train, and it seemed so far and so alien that my mother cried with fear.
She was right, too. London is far away from Rotherham. Toronto was much further. But the difference was that I was getting on in one spot and hopping off in another, seeing nothing of what lay between. My grandmother was watching as 160 miles of country passed her by, understanding the distance and the changes and the significance of space. She felt every one of those 160 miles.
Lately, I have grown to hate flying. It’s killing the planet, yes, but it’s also miserable as fuck. Rammed in a tiny seat, the guy in front throwing his chair back to within an inch of your face, the inherent lack of dignity in being manhandled by security; it sucks. Sometimes it’s unavoidable if you want to see loved ones—I wouldn’t have got to New Zealand earlier this year by boat, or not at least without giving up a quarter a year—but I have started to look for where it might be avoidable, even if it takes a lot more time by other means. I’ve long since given up flying domestically, because the planet is on fire, but I’m trying not to fly for work at all—so when I was invited to a week-long residency in Tuscany earlier this year, I started to wonder what it might look like to go on the train. It would be longer, of course, but is that a bad thing, when you don’t have any particular restrictions on your time? Is it not a classic part of travel to feel the distances you’re travelling, see the countries you’re moving through, to get on a train and feel like you really are going somewhere different, rather than just arriving at a new destination?
I had another reason, too. As a writer working today, when so much of your income comes from other paid work, it can be difficult to make time and space to actually think; to do the non-writing, meandering, considering, experiencing that create the conditions for creativity. You have to live a little, to have something to write about. As a human, the last twelve months have been existentially devastating, and it’s hard to come by uncomplicated pleasure these days, difficult to find yourself when so much horror is ongoing. I wanted to find some joy. Flying is undoubtedly awful for the planet, but it’s also robbing us of the pleasures of travel. If you have the time and money, why not make the journey part of the trip?
Before I go any further: this post isn’t intended to say that any of this is possible for you specifically. I’m giving all the details of the trip here as people have asked me for them, but to caveat: I am able bodied, relatively fit, white, not broke, not a parent, fairly well travelled, generally quite un-anxious (though prone to hilariously odd travel woes, mishaps that have simply never happened to anyone before); I speak a tiny bit of French and German and a bit more Spanish and don’t mind carrying a medium-heavy bag. I don’t eat meat but I do now eat fish and dairy. I work freelance and can do that from anywhere, or take time out from it when if I can afford it. My partner is at home feeding the cats. I knew that if it all went tits up halfway across the continent, I had enough money in my bank account to be able to sort most things out.
Having said that, at every point in this trip people could (and did) speak English to me when my rudimentary language skills failed, and all I took with me bags-wise was my homemade Jack Tar and a Trakke 35L backpack which fits the dimensions of hand luggage for most airlines (and which I did NOT pay full price for, I hasten to add). Public transport and strategic planning meant I wasn’t walking for miles with all my stuff, but I could carry it all without an issue. I paid £11 to be able to use my usual phone contract in Europe so had basically full data access everywhere, even in the Alps. I like my own company, and actually love travelling alone. The purpose of putting all this down is to say that if you’re like me in any number of ways, and you might usually jump on a plane to somewhere like Italy or Croatia or Germany or anywhere else you’ve been invited for work or play, then maybe taking a few extra days out of your life to go via the trains, to feel the miles, is not only more ethical, but also really worth it.
How easy is it to get to Tuscany by train? In the normal course of things, not really that difficult; you’d get the train from Glasgow to London, the Eurostar to Paris, then get to Milan direct from Paris in around 7 hours; local trains take you to Tuscany from there. Except there was a landslide last year that took out the Paris-Milan route, meaning you basically have to go via Switzerland or the south of France. Or go first via Switzerland, and the south of France on the way back. One conversation with my brother, a climber and landscape photographer who was adamant that the Swiss alps make you “feel glad to be alive”, and it was decided: that was going to be my route.
How does one formulate going so far? It’s always going to be a balance between enjoyment, spending and speed. I was in less of a rush and more keen to spend a bit of time in a handful of places, seeing some beautiful things. I decided I would go all the way to Lyon, then rather than doing the bigger Swiss cities I would prioritise train trips through the Alps, staying two nights in each in Zermatt and St. Moritz, then down to Tuscany; there I’d have a week in one place (the countryside near the ‘most Scottish town in Italy’, Barga), then on the way back, I would go around the north Italian coast to Nice, then up to Paris, then finally home. In total, almost three weeks of the trip.
To be honest I never really did the maths to find out whether an Interrail pass really would be the cheapest way to do this, because I’d already decided on it. I’d never done the Interrailing thing and liked the idea; call me a romantic. I’ll share all the details, for those who might need the info, but basically it was easy, and semi-flexible, and led me to take some phenomenal journeys that I would not have otherwise even considered or known about. I would do it again in a heartbeat.
This post will be a two-parter, because there is a limit to how many photos/how much text you can send via email. But part two will include all the details of how the Interrail pass works and the hidden information you might need to make sense of the whole system. So subscribe here, and you’ll get that post too.
Because I am a Scorpio and a second child, I decided to go balls to the wall on my first travel day, and travel all the way from Glasgow to Lyon. This, perhaps, was a little ill-advised, as my meticulously planned schedule was immediately fucked by my first first train, the 7:30 am Glasgow—London one, being cancelled. I had somewhat anticipated this and had booked the earlier train, leaving time for lunch in London with a dear friend as well as an hour for Eurostar check in—so although I had to miss lunch with Yas, I did still make it. My advice is to assume that any UK train will be cancelled or otherwise delayed, and plan accordingly.
In Paris, it was a short RER trip from the Gare du Nord to the Gare de Lyon (an hour’s walk otherwise), then a couple of hours to Lyon. This was a hell of a long travel day, all in, and next time I’d probably do an overnight in Paris; there aren’t a ton of sleeper trains between France and different countries, otherwise I might have done that. Lyon, thankfully, was completely delightful. I walked 18 miles around the city in a day, taking in churches, the Ancient Theatre of Fourvière, the Musée Lumière; I bought cheese and rollmops for my lunch from Les Halles, had wine in the sun, ate dinner at a place that sparked an idea for an upcoming project (which remains secret for now). I didn’t swim at the Lido below but I really wish I had. I found negroni macarons and read Naomi Klein over coffee. I did almost get trapped in the backyard of the place I was staying (told you: travel calamities love me), but managed to get out. Did I mention the cheese?
Unless you buy an unlimited Interrail pass, you get a certain amount of travel days; I had structured my trip so that all my travel fit into seven days, stopping off somewhere interesting if I could. On my second travel day, I walked the 15 minutes from my accommodation to Lyon Part-Dieu station, grabbed a coffee and got on a 2-hour train across the Swiss border to Geneva; no checks, no stress. I got on another 2-hour train that went into the Alps, going by spectacular lakes and rivers on the way, and wrote and edited for a couple of hours (eating some more cheese and olive bread that I’d bought from a dangerously handsome man in Lyon). At Visp I got off the train and hopped on 15-minute bus (ticket already purchased on the SBB app), to go here:
This is the Brigerbad thermal spa, one of the largest open air thermal baths in Switzerland; a place my sister-in-law told me about. It cost me 40 CHF (£36) to go for three hours, although there are cheaper options if you don’t want to use the inside parts like the sauna or the thermal cave. Lush as it looks, though, it is not a fancy place; it is a public baths, where kids go after school and old ladies go to cook in the 40-degree grotto pool. They do not even give you a towel, nor do they coddle you. There were, I think, about a dozen separate characters here just waiting to be written about. I absolutely loved it.
This whole area is fascinating, not least because of the confluence of languages in an area where France, Italy and Switzerland meet. The German-speaking people in the Upper Valais speak a really distinct dialect known as Walliserdeutsch, a type of Highest Alemannic, mostly non-understandable for those of us with only long-departed GCSE-level German, which also incorporates aspects of French pronounced in the most un-French way you can imagine. If you’re on a trip that is already testing your ability to understand three languages, it’s going to throw you a really enjoyable curveball.
The bus from Visp station to the thermal spa was 6 CHF return (about £5.50), and really easy to navigate. When I’d finished at the baths, I jumped back on the bus down to Visp station and caught another hour-long train to Zermatt, one of the most expensive places in mainland Europe (something I learned AFTER I’d booked), which rests 1,620 metres above sea level, at the foot of the glorious Matterhorn. The train from Visp to Zermatt is called the Matterhorn Gotthard Bahn; if you go all the way to the Oberalp Pass, you’ll cover a difference in altitude of 3,300m, and go through 33 tunnels and cross 126 bridges. There’s a really delightful little video about that trip by someone here, which captures the beauty of the journey far better than I managed to, though I can show you how nice the trains were:
What we’ve been made to forget in the UK is that in a lot of other European countries, train travel is just so relentlessly pleasant. The trains go (mostly) on time, and there’s loads of room, and they don’t cost hundreds of pounds per go. You saunter slowly through some of the most incredible scenery, eating a baguette and drinking an espresso you got for a few quid. Add in some of the most awe-inspiring scenery, and you sort of don’t really want to arrive at your destination at all. Not only do you feel every mile, every mile feels delightful. It’s just… nice.
Zermatt is a car-free town, a place straight off the side of a tin of Christmas biscuits, full of the kind of people who don’t mind spending €30 on a bowl of pho and everyone else who is buying (very decent quality) food from the local Co-op. It’s obviously a snowboarder’s paradise, and you can ski if you’re one of those, but on the off-season you can jump on the (expensive) gondolas to get up the mountains to do a hike, which was my intention. Despite the fact that I’d only taken a light rain jacket and Converse (one of the issues of travelling between very cold places and very hot is the packing issue, already compounding my ability to never quite have the right clothes with me), my intention was to travel up to the Sunnegga station and do the 2.5-hour-long Five Lakes Walk, stopping at this alpine hut for lunch with a spectacular view of the peak of the Matterhorn, feeling very smug as I ate my overpriced spätzle and drank my local beer. However, once I’d paid the €50 gondola fee, psyched myself up, determined that I was unlikely to die even though I was on my own, travelled up the mountain and stepped out at the Sunnegga station, this was the view that greeted me:
It’s lore in my family that when it comes to travel I am both reckless and an idiot, but even I could see that trying to hike part of the Swiss Alps in wet Converse with zero visibility on my own would be a foolhardy endeavour. I am also a keen hiker exactly up until the point that the weather becomes in any way inclement, and then I simply want to die / be curled up with a glass of wine and a blanket somewhere in front of a large fire. I meandered around the station for a bit before accepting that my 50 Euros were lost to fate, and that the weather had bested me; I would just have to come back one day, for my smug Matterhorn lunch experience. As my mother said, while laughing at my Instagram stories: you win some, you lose some.
There isn’t a ton to do in Zermatt itself, though the mountaineer’s cemetery is really moving; the last resting place of many of the climbers who’ve lost their lives on the Matterhorn, including some of the men from the ill-fated first ascent. Despite only costing £100 per night, my hotel had a small but beautiful afternoon spa for guests only, including a hot pool with a direct view of the mountain (at least when the clouds broke). This is the thing about Zermatt: Everywhere you look there is another spectacular view, to a breathtaking extent. It’s wild how happy you can be, just eating a 4 Euro pasta salad on your balcony and feeling small next to mountains.
The next travel day was the biggie: the eight-hour Glacier Express. I can’t remember how I came upon this journey, but as soon as I read about it I knew I was going to base my whole trip around it.
“Switzerland’s most scenic train”, the Glacier Express connects Zermatt and St. Moritz (a place pronounced four different ways depending on who you’re talking to), travelling 181 miles through the Alps, over 291 bridges and through 91 tunnels. It’s a slow train, travelling an average of 24 mph, because the entire point is to be able to see everything. The carriages are almost all window, so you can see the kind of landscape that defies any attempt to describe its magnificence: glaciers, frozen peaks, blankets of green grass, a track that cuts through the very heart of the mountain range. This is the type of photo you see if you go on any of the promotional websites:
Completely wildly, this trip is actually covered by the Interrail pass; all you have to do is pay a seat reservation fee that was less than 50 CHF, even for first class. There’s an ‘excellence class’ that’s more expensive, but even I have my limits.
You can, if you want, get a three-course lunch at your seat, and champagne for that matter, but I’d brought sushi rolls and chocolate with me, and just treated myself to some perfectly perfunctory wine from their menu. I was sat next to a 71-year-old American man named Jeff for all eight hours of the trip, and given that no one wants to read while there’s much better things to look at, we ended up talking about everything from jazz festivals to policies to house the homeless (hi, Jeff, if you’re reading this).
Though we set off in blue skies, as we got further along the trip it started to snow, meaning that we passed the highest part of the alps in a white-blanket blizzard, as if we were moving through Christmastown. It was a long eight hours, but every moment of it had the sorts of views that barely feel real even when you’re looking at the them; you poke your head out of the open window at the end of the carriage and it feels as if you’re dunking your head in ice cold water. Plug in your headphones and the voiceover gives you a commentary of where you’re going and what’s ahead. What is flying, compared to this?
I took approximately one million photos and videos of this trip, but unfortunately one of the properties of glass is its reflective quality; no matter how hard you try, the photos can never quite escape the ghosts of whatever’s behind you. This gives my record of the event a highly gothic undertone, which to be honest I quite enjoy.
You can take just part of the Glacier Express route, but I took the whole thing, ending up in St. Moritz, a much bigger and more famous town than Zermatt, and in fact I stayed not there exactly but in Champfèr, a village in the Upper Engadin just a 15-minute bus ride away. I can’t remember why I made this choice because there are inexpensive places to stay within St. Moritz itself, but navigating the bus was easy enough, and as I walked out of the back doors of my room, I was greeted with this sight, of the Albula Alps:
A lot of hotels in these places will include, with the cost of your stay, free passes for the network of gondolas, funiculars and ski lifts that dot the area, connecting the ski runs, alpine huts and hikes that everyone comes for. My hotel did this, so I was able to get the bus into St. Moritz proper, have a mediocre coffee and a phenomenal cake at one of the town’s oldest and most famous cafes, then get the funicular and a gondola up to where the proper ski lifts began, at Corviglia; my plan was to get as close as I could to the top of Piz Nair, and eat wherever I could in the surrounding area.
However, I was bested again by the weather; I got to Corviglia and it was undeniably snowing. I hadn’t quite anticipated that a bit of snow would shut down the cable cars and ski lifts, being that, to my mind, that’s the entire point of them: to take people to the snow. However, it was also a touch windy, and out of season for that weather; everyone told me that September snowbursts are unusual; for safety reasons, you could go no higher. I can only assume that travel gods simply don’t trust me to go too high into the Swiss alps, lest I stumble off a ridge and fall to my icy death.
However, there is a bar at Corviglia station, where you can get a meal and some good chat, or if you’ve just eaten a massive slice of rich chocolate cake, you can paint a little bit, have two local beers, eat some snacks and nuts and just bask in the fact you’re at least part of the way up a mountain in a snowstorm in Switzerland, with the closed cable car station giving distinct The Thing vibes. Then you can head down, take one thousand photos, go back to your hotel and spend the rest of the day in the spa.
If you read the guides, you’ll be told that the two big scenic train journeys in Switzerland are the Glacier Express and the Bernina Express, the latter going between the Alps and northern Italy. For some reason, I just hadn’t thought about the Bernina, despite the fact that, after my day in St. Moritz, that’s exactly where I was going: down from the Alps to Tirano, in northern Italy, to head down to Milan and on to Tuscany.
When I figured out that I might be missing out on the good version of a trip I had to make anyway, I did some last-minute Googling and found out that you can actually travel on the Bernina without paying extra and without booking in advance (I’ll go into more detail how in part two). So I changed my Sunday plans, and actually took an hour off the already epic trip down to my residency. For this, I was rewarded with views that were just as incredible as the Glacier Express ones, but this time with a lot more photo-taking ability, including a section of the track where the train circles, stops and lets off passengers entirely for photography reasons.
This type of travel is not, in the way we understand it, at all convenient. The routes are not direct, the journeys not quick. But what they are is majestic, or as my brother put it, “life-affirming”. Even when you get to the top of a mountain to discover you can’t see a fucking thing; even when you wish you’d brought proper hiking boots and more appropriate clothes than a very thin fleece, a shirt and a long sleeved top. There are few words to describe what it feels like sitting on a train going round Lake Geneva from Geneva to Montreaux, looking out across the water under sweeping, clear skies—or pootling through the Alps in the blazing sun on the Bernina Express, a carriage to yourself, listening to Beck’s 9-minute, 157-piece-orchestra version of Sound and Vision, complete with a yodeler. I would take these experiences over being shoved onto an EasyJet flight every day of the week; I would go miles and miles out of my way, spending more money and time, to see things that I will remember forever.
By the time I got off the Bernina Express, I was in Italy; I went onwards from Tirano to Milan, then Genova, then despite football-crowd-related delays I eventually I made it to WriteToscana, where I was presented with a glass of wine and a hell of a view across the Tuscan countryside. Less than a day later I’d already broken a book loose of the mental constraints I’d put it in and had figured out what it really should be, which made the entire trip worthwhile (I had been driving myself to distraction about it). I’ll write about that week elsewhere, but for now I’ll leave you with this view, from the Bernina, and pick up the journey home next fortnight—and, because a bunch of you asked, I’ll lay down all tricks you need to know to do an Interrail journey like this.
And honestly, I’d love you to—if you can, and have the time and the money. Because this is worth it, right?
This post was not sponsored by Interrail, though I would absolutely have taken their money. In lieu of that, do feel free to become a paid subscriber, for less than the price of a coffee per month.
Oh wow I really enjoyed reading that, what gorgeous slow travel! Thank you ❤️
I just loved reading this. Not only about the topic but your way of writing. It's given me some great inspiration for a future trip!