Applied Anthropology at 80km/hr

I take the 11:54 Regionale from Torino to Milano, which covers about 140 kilometres in one hour fifty-five minutes for €15. There is a bus operated by FlixBus, a company whose name sounds like a millennial's attempt to make transportation sexy, that covers the same distance in about the same time, for €8. The mathematics are unforgiving in their clarity.

And yet.

I am not optimising for arithmetic. An act that would mystify my beloved ISTJ friends, who consider all worthwhile decisions fundamentally mathematical, but which has become the lingua franca of a generation raised to believe that efficiency equals virtue. This is not romanticising European rail culture, though there is something to be said for infrastructure conceived during an era when humans had not yet developed the capacity to be disappointed by three-second delays in digital communication.

The bus is adequate if coordinates are all you require. The train operates according to different logic entirely, acknowledging the radical possibility that the space between departure and arrival might contain information worth processing. Stops punctuate the journey, each a brief ethnographic opportunity, a window into how northern Italy has organised itself in the early decades of the twenty-first century. Applied anthropology at eighty kilometres per hour.

The gentleman across from me has been reading the same page of Il Sole 24 Ore for twenty minutes. Either he has encountered financial analysis so dense it requires the intellectual excavation typically reserved for Heidegger, or he has discovered that a broadsheet provides excellent camouflage for contemplative rest with eyes open. Both seem reasonable for a Tuesday afternoon.

At Chivasso, three women board carrying shopping from establishments that predate online reviews. Perhaps the kind of local businesses that survive because people still believe in purchasing tomatoes from someone who knows their name. One immediately launches into a comprehensive analysis of why her daughter-in-law's career trajectory represents "completamente sbagliata." A conversation that will continue until Milano.

This is why I pay the €7 premium. Not for misguided sentiment about European rail culture, but for access to the ordinary intelligence of people moving through their own landscape with purpose and familiarity. This observation cannot be achieved while sealed inside highway efficiency, unable to witness how three generations negotiate shared space or overhear the economic anxieties that shape contemporary life.

At Settimo Torinese, a gentleman in an impeccable overcoat boards with the quiet confidence of someone who has solved Milano Centrale's labyrinthine puzzle, and possibly someone who knows exactly which car will deposit him closest to his preferred exit. He unfolds Corriere della Sera as if it were made of silk and begins reading without consulting his phone once.

I envy his relationship with technology.

Behind me, a teenager conducts a private tutorial in English conditionals. "If I were to visit London..." His pronunciation is careful, hopeful, tinged with understanding that his future will require not merely linguistic competence but dexterity. By Milano, he will have mastered the subjunctive mood that confounds most native speakers.

The tourists in seats 47A and B are exhibiting temporal distress syndrome. We’re fifteen minutes behind schedule. They consult multiple chronometers as if measurement might accelerate our progress. The businessman with the silk newspaper technique checks his watch once and offers a Mediterranean shrug.

When we glide into Stazione Centrale Milano eighteen minutes late, a ritual unfolds. The businessman folds his newspaper with religious precision, the Chivasso advisory committee gathers their bags with the satisfaction of consultants who have resolved a family crisis, and the future polyglot closes his textbook having conquered another linguistic territory. Most disembark with the unhurried grace of people who understand that Milano has been waiting two thousand years and can manage a few more minutes.

Milano Centrale receives us with the theatrical grandiosity Mussolini intended, fascism's aesthetic philosophy made marble: the belief that overwhelming surfaces could convince travelers they were entering a city of genuine consequence rather than another railway stop. The architecture still inspires awe, though today it mostly inspires navigation anxiety in me.

Yet the station retains what contemporary airports have eliminated: arrival as a genuine event rather than logistical transition. Walter Benjamin described these great European stations as urban cathedrals, and this charactersation rings true as Milano Centrale transforms the mundane act of changing trains into something approaching ceremony.

Next week I will take the bus back to Torino, conducting what might be called a comparative transportation experiment, though I suspect the most efficient route between coordinates teaches you nothing about the coordinates themselves, or about the people who have chosen to make their lives in the spaces between them.

For today, I am walking through Milano's chaos €7 poorer but considerably better educated about how contemporary Italy organises its anxieties, its generational negotiations, and its approach to balancing individual desire with collective responsibility.