The crucial moment in one of the world's most peculiar train rides comes when the sleeper from Palermo grinds into Messina each evening and, after a series of jolts and groans, eases into the bowels of a large white ferry. Minutes later, as the ferry leaves port with the carriages on board, passengers tumble out of their bunks, drop into the hold of the ship, head round the back of the train and up to the bar where they order an arancino and watch Sicily receding as the lights of the Italian mainland approach. When I took it, the 25-minute ride across the Straits of Messina gave me just enough time to polish off the fried ball of rice, mozzarella and ragu while standing on deck sniffing the salty Mediterranean breeze. Then the ferry arrived, aligned the tracks in its innards with those on the dock, and the train rattled off into the night towards Rome.
It's memorable, it's romantic, and now is a good time to take it, since the service is being cut back thanks to passengers flocking to the new low-cost flights from Sicily. Sleepers still get as far as Rome, but last December the services to Milan and Turin – long favoured by Sicilian families making new lives in the north – were unceremoniously scrapped, alongside the night trains linking northern Italy with Puglia in Italy's heel and Calabria in the toe.
"In the 150th anniversary of Italy's unification, railway officials managed to do in a day what the Northern League party here has tried and failed to do in a decade – split Italy in two," one night train guard complained to me bitterly.
Rail operator Trenitalia argues that night train passengers have dropped 60% in 10 years and it is losing €95m a year on the service, despite government subsidies. But more than 20,000 night-train regulars and aficionados were incensed, signing a petition to save the routes as 800 guards and staff were laid off. And because protests are never dull in Italy, three guards barricaded themselves up a tower at Milan station, claiming they would not come down until the routes were resumed.
Italian newspapers turned out nostalgic tales of the service's glory days in the 1950s and 1960s when southern migrants armed with cardboard suitcases would queue for up to 18 hours for a one-way ticket to a job in the booming factories in Turin and Milan. Even now, watching Sicilians board the sleepers dressed in absurdly heavy clothing to combat what they suspect will be polar conditions in Rome, you get a sense of migrants heading for an unknown country. And when I mentioned to a group of Sicilians my arancino on the deck of the boat train, they all nodded, recalling moments when they had enjoyed their last bite of the Sicilian staple before heading north.
After launching in 1899, the boat-train service has soldiered on, despite one ship sinking after hitting a mine in the First World War and another going to the bottom after being scuttled by fleeing Germans in 1943. Raised five years later, the ship was patched up and sailed until 1991. Now the service – albeit reduced – looks like it might outlive Silvio Berlusconi, whose parties and court appearances left him no time to realise his dream of building a road and rail bridge across the straits.
These days rail planners prefer to focus on the new fast trains they are pouring money into, which are, admittedly, quietly revolutionising Italy by shaving times off journeys between Rome and Milan, and into Milan from Turin and Bologna. But I wanted to savour the dying days of the sleeper trains and chose to take them whenever I could after the December cutbacks were announced.
I usually sleep terribly and promise after every trip not do it again in a hurry, but am soon looking for another excuse, since nothing beats showing up for the night train at Rome's Termini station, where chunks of Roman masonry stand outside the glass-fronted entrance hall and trains pull into platforms decked out with 1930s mosaics, sleek black stone benches and art-deco drinking fountains. And when the sleeper is the last train to leave the cold, deserted station at night, there is real pleasure in being greeted by the guard and knowing that a warm bed and a night light is inches away.
On a trip back to Rome one evening last month from Bolzano near the Austrian border, I booked my night-train ticket and had just enough time to set off through porticoed streets to eat roast duck, apple sauce and red cabbage at a trattoria, surrounded by German-speaking Italians laughing and knocking back tall glasses of beer. Arriving back at the wood-panelled station after navigating Bolzano's empty, freezing-cold piazzas, I waited in the platform bar with a group of labourers who were keeping warm and watching TV before the night train to Naples pulled in punctually at 9.30pm.
For €103 I had booked a bunk in a two-bed cabin in the hope I would have it all to myself. In the next cabin a young couple were singing along to a tinny Italian ballad playing on a cell phone. By 11.30pm they had turned in and the guard tapped on the door to tell me no one had boarded at Verona and the cabin was all mine.
Speaking in a lush Neapolitan accent far removed from the German I had been listening to in the trattoria, the guard was happy to reminisce about his 25 years working on the sleepers. "I've seen everything," he said. "These trains have always been the perfect meeting place for lovers. One boards and then the other gets on at the next stop. You see a lot of traffic in the corridor at night. Actors, judges, politicians, you name it."
One thing was missing. Until then, guards checking my name off as I climbed on board had asked the crucial question: "Espresso or cappuccino?" before bringing me coffee in the morning as my station approached. I inquired and the guard walked me down to his tiny compartment at the end of the corridor where a small, gleaming espresso machine sat idle on a shelf. "With all the money being diverted into fast trains, they are bleeding the sleeper service with cuts and have even stopped sending coffee for the machine," he said sadly.
"Apologies," he added. "It's fruit juice from now on."
Essentials
The Palermo-Rome sleeper crosses the Straits of Messina by ferry in the evening. Trains from Rome make the crossing in the middle of the night. Tickets start from €82.60 for a bed in a four-bunk cabin to €132.80 for a bed in a two-bunk cabin and €181.80 for a single cabin (trenitalia.com)
