The railways in the time of Mussolini, arrived on time and were used to move around. In the time of the psycho-dwarf and his chums of the PDminusL they arrive late and they are used to hand out contracts. In Sicily there are still the fascist trains, with nine hours of train ride from Palermo to Ragusa. Italian commuters travel as though they were in cattle trucks. To make up for that we’ll have the TAV {high speed train} in the Susa Valley for the European corridor and the Messina Bridge. Great works for Great Contractors.

My name is Claudio Gatti. I am a special correspondent with “Il Sole 24 Ore” based in New York. I’ve been living in America for thirty years, and it’s here that I have learned the job of investigative journalist and I decided to write this book and have a go at the railways, because I believe that the railways represent the genetic code of a country, but above all that they are a litmus paper for everything that’s not right, that doesn’t work in Italy and perhaps for the Italians.
In August, Daniel Cohn Bendit, the leader of the German and French student movement, and the leader of the German ‘Greens’, gave an interview and said “Italy is a country that is sick and suffering from individualism and ‘I-couldn’t-care-less-ism’. It’s a country where a collective national project is missing”. I feel that the railways are an abandoned collective national project and they symbolize a way of doing, a managerial culture, a way of being that is typical of Italy. That’s why I feel that this book is interesting: just because with this journey on the inside, it tackles an experience that all Italians go through and a way of operating, a way of living, a way of relating to the public good, a way of managing the public good, a private management of the public good is the mirror of this country. As someone who resides abroad, I arrive in Italy, I disembark at Fiumicino or Malpensa and I get the train to take me into the city, and just as I do, so do all the foreigners that have just arrived: that train is for me, a litmus test for Italy. It’s the first approach that foreigners have with our country. It is an approach that is symbolic of our country, because the trains are not clean, because the trains are not on time. In Italy, in the last five years, they have invested about 6 billion Euro a year. Italian citizens, 22 million Italian families have paid a rail licence fee, without knowing it, of 273 Euro a year. With all that investment, Italy should have the right to have good quality, clean railways, with Swiss punctuality, but instead, unfortunately, after all these years, we continue to have Italian-style quality, punctuality and cleanliness. And this is not acceptable. I have tried to understand, however, what this is due to and I think that with the help of those that have guided me, of those who have given me access to documents, of those who have explained to me the significance of certain data, of email messages, it’s possible to have a better understanding why these problems are still unresolved. I have found extraordinary email messages,: there was one dated in the Spring of 2006 which talked about legionella, Legionnaires’ disease, and bacteria of this disease had been found, and in a few months a conductor, a railway worker in Rome died. Trenitalia discussed who should do the cleaning and there was a continuous passing of the buck.

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