Yesterday, I made a spontaneous train trip to Milan. As always, upon entering Milan’s central station, I looked out for the red cars of the German night train, parked there somewhere. But they were nowhere to be seen. Only then did I remember that the train was cancelled for good in December. Which left me with quite a bit of sadness.

A couple of years ago, when my love affair with Italy began in earnest, night train 301 from Dortmund, later Amsterdam, to Milan was a great facilitator of my obsession. It left Karlsruhe around midnight and many a Friday I was on it. Usually, I had a bunk in a couchette compartment but occasionally I treated myself to a sleeper. Hardly ever did it arrive in Milan on time. There was always something. Sometimes it would already arrive late in Karlsruhe, meaning a long and cold wait on a dreary platform. Another time, it would manage to travel on time all the way down to Chiasso on the Italian border only to have the Italian railways reject a car and require lengthy shunting procedures. Most likely, though, the last half hour between Chiasso and Milan would mysteriously take a full hour or more.

From Milan, I would go on with some other train, to Genoa, Pisa, Bologna, Rome, or elsewhere. I would spend the weekend there and then Monday scout out some new destination on the way to Florence. If the place was nice, I would visit again during the next trip. I always arrived exhausted in Florence, too tired to see much of the city and would spend the evening on the platform of the Santa Maria Novella station, the most beautifully named central station of any city, waiting for the night train back to Munich.

Later, when I came across the good fortune to live in Lugano for a while, I would sometimes stumble across the train at Lugano station. Leaving there around seven, it was the first train going to Milan and one of the last to come back. Sometimes, I would take it from Lugano back to Germany, enjoying a trip across the nightly Alps with glass of Merlot in a cosy sleeper compartment.

History, now.