Milan, and the narrower train

The thing you notice on the train to Milan is that it's narrower. The EuroCity out of Zürich is an Italian tilting train, and to lean into the curves the body tapers in above the windows, so your shoulder sits closer to the glass than a Swiss carriage would ever allow. Not uncomfortable, just different, and it told me I was going somewhere else more plainly than any sign. Under the Gotthard in the base tunnel, twenty minutes of nothing, then Ticino, then Chiasso and Italy, and it tilts the whole way down so you step off faintly seasick and cheerful with it.

Milano Centrale is worth missing a tram for. You come up off the platforms into a stone hall built, very deliberately, to make one person feel small, all 1930s eagles and friezes and too much of everything. It knows it's too much. I stood in the middle getting jostled and looked straight up like a tourist, which for once I was.

But I'd really come for six o'clock. Somewhere around then the city stops for a drink, and the drink turns up with food you didn't order and don't pay for: a Campari soda the colour of a warning, olives and crisps and squares of frittata, which in a generous bar comes to dinner if you have no shame. South of the Alps I have very little. We did this by the Navigli, the old canals, the crowd spilling off the pavement as the light went.

Dinner anyway, because we're greedy: risotto alla milanese in a loud trattoria with the tables too close, the saffron one, marrow and an unreasonable amount of butter and parmesan, the colour of nothing much and the taste of the opposite. Marc had the cotoletta, hung over the edge of the plate. We argued without heat about who'd ordered better. Risotto wins. It always wins.

Two days later the tilting train north, narrower than ever now I knew to feel it, and I slept against the too-close window most of the way home.

— Tobi