We are aboard Trenitalia’s 1045 Eurostar from Rome to Venice........

We are aboard Trenitalia’s 1045 Eurostar from Rome to Venice. This train is fast, averaging 200 kilometers per hour. When we run alongside the motorway, fanging black Alfas are left behind in our slipstream. Otherwise, the train is quiet and smooth and the speed deceptive.

We have already whizzed through Lazio and Tuscany, stopping in Florence. The train will stop again in Bologna and Padua before we glide into Venice’s St Lucia station.

The countryside between Rome and Florence is beautiful. We whiz past highly cultivated orchards, olive and citrus groves, flocks of sheep on small green fields and farmhouses. There are hill-top ruins and villages – and I see places every minute that I’d like to stop at.

The train is full. A mixture, we deduce, of tourists like us on their grand tours, with suitcases the size of delivery vans, maps, guidebooks, scruffy - and Italians, students and business people, who are better dressed, lightly packed and slightly bored.

Because this is Italy, the four facing seats we selected from an automatic ticket machine are in fact separated by the aisle. Syl and I sit opposite each other, while the kids play cards across the aisle. An elderly Florentine has engaged them in small talk and compliments us on their behaviour. And indeed, they are good. In small ways, travel has become a way of being for them now. They adapt to their circumstances, rather than challenge them. 

Also, because this is Italy, an Italian princess joins us in Florence and sits beside Syl. She is beautiful, black on black on black, with a huge soft shoulder bag.

Taking her seat, she looks around quickly, decides that nothing warrants her attention and distractedly plucks hairs from her dress, dropping them to the floor disapprovingly. She moisturizes her hands, a lengthy process, applies lipstick, ties her hair back. She inspects her reflection in the train window frequently and minutely.

In between, she makes four calls, texts frenetically and listens to her ipod. As a concession to our confined circumstances, she is restrained in the gesticulation that goes with each call. Only occasionally, she clobbers Syl to make a point to her invisible conversationalist. She fills each second with musical, emphatic talk. I suspect her caller is doing the same and wonder at this talk-on-talk.

Her whole being is, for me, an exhausting, elegant spectacle.