On Thursday morning we felt that we were starting the long trek home, although there are still several days of travel to go. All a little sad although good things must come to an end and there are plenty of reasons to look forward to being back in NZ of course!
We drove from Positano back up to Rome via Cassino and stopped to look at the abbey and commonwealth cemetery. The abbey was completely destroyed during the fighting in WW2. It has been rebuilt and is back in use as an abbey - this wasn't the first time it had been destroyed and rebuilt in the course of its history after all.
The view from the abbey just reinforces how difficult a military position it must have been to take - it dominates the whole valley. About 40,000 German troops held up 345,000 allied troops for about 9 months at the Gustav line of which Monte Cassino was a part. There is a good book about the battle and the bigger strategies involved by Michael Parker. The cemetery had rows and rows of NZ war graves, bringing home the human cost of what happened. Then there were the rows of Australian, British, Canadian, and Indian graves too. And then whole separate cemeteries (although we did not have time to visit them) telling the same stories about the German, French, American and Polish soldiers who died there.
Friday - as I write we are humming along on the Frecciarossa train en route to Milan. This is the fast train, capable of up to 360kph, but we haven't yet managed more than about 250kph. There have been a number of delays and some slow running which has made us over 30min late (predicted) on a 3 hour journey. Not a problem for tourists on a relaxed schedule! The on board displays tell you how fast the train is going, how early/late it is predicted to be, and various notices about coming changes due to engineering works etc (which I can't really decipher.)
The train is otherwise excellent. Very smooth - just a few little lurches that coincide with the spelling mistakes in the blog. (?) There is a cafe car and we also get served free cold drinks at our seats occasionally. And thats just in 2nd class. For the record, espresso coffee on board is 1.50 euro and maxi toast is 4.50 euro. Maxi toast is a ham & cheese toasted sandwich - pretty chic. Mine was delicious but J's was not. The prices are pretty normal, in fact the coffee is cheap compared to most cafes. But I've long since stopped caring about how much such things cost. (Might have to revise that attitude soon...)
The rail infrastructure is massive of course. There are huge yards, mostly empty of wagons, and quite a few yellow machines parked up. Very little sign of activity - perhaps it all happens at night or in special blocks. A side effect of having such an asset is that there are lots of great opportunities for graffiti, most of which have been taken up, and there seems to be little effort to do anything about it. But as mentioned a while ago it doesn't seem to be as ugly as back home for some reason. Also they are not short of a weed or two in the ballast.
Milan's main station, Milano Centrale, is the largest station in Italy. It was built by Mussolini in a sort of fascist architectural style although the obvious symbols of his regime have long been removed.
P.S. For anyone interested the train did stretch out to 300kph for a while - conveniently next to a motorway so we could be seen flashing past all the cars.
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