Dove fermano i treni

In 1960, at the time of the declaration of independence form France, Mauritania's authorities began the construction of the national railway, which started operating 60 years ago, in 1963. The network consists of a single, 704-kilometre long, line linking the iron mining centre of Zouérat with the port of Nouadhibou, via Fderik and Choum.

In Choum the train was supposed to stop sometime between 6 and 10pm. It meant that 12-hour long journey would have been surrounded by the pitch dark, coolish desert night. The reality was quite the opposite...the SNIM, the Société nationale industrielle et minière, couldn't help but delaying the train by 12 hours, so the convoy finally showed up at 5.30am.

More than 2km long, the train is made up of three diesel locomotives, one passenger carriage and between 200 and 210 freight cars. When loaded on the westward journey to Nouadhibou, each car can carry up to 84 tons of iron ore. I took my spot in one of those freight cars, along with a handful of shiny happy people from the US, UK, Greece and Germany. The railway also allows a few locals to hitch a free ride through the desert, which makes the journey more authentic, not just a lousy touristy paying-adrenaline-induced experience.

Instead it was quite beautiful. The environment, the out of the world dimension, the sunrise, the wild camels, the bunch of cheering human beings, the inherently peaceful context. I was slightly concerned as I breathe awfully bad, but the fact that I stayed up most of the time and that the speed was no more than 40km/h, helped big time. So helped my 1993 goggles and the 450-pages long book. Shame that by noon I ran out of food, by 1pm I finished the book and by 2pm my goggles started falling apart. Hence, the last 4 hours were a bit more challenging: nothing to read, nothing to eat, no toilet breaks, the wind blowing the sand and the dust, the temperature rising up to 36 degrees, no shelter whatsoever and not a chance I could put sunscreen on, as my arms were covered in iron ore.

Nothing that couldn't be fixed with a decent dinner and 3 showers in the next 24 hours. 

Cold ones.

Viva l'Italia

 

I was fortunate enough to be born in Trastevere, to grow up 2km from the Colosseum and go to school halfway between Piazza Navona and the Trevi Fountain. It was a stroke of luck, but only up until I had to find a parking spot for my four-wheeled vehicle. Until then, the worst thing that happened was being caught by a teacher while plotting to conquer the world and ending up in her bad books. This was my story in fifth grade. 

‘You’ll have to visit San Clemente on Sunday and then talk about it to the class,’ my teacher asserted. Despite Maria Montessori featuring on the 1000-lira banknote, the Italian educational system in the ’80s believed the most effective way to shape little humans was to charge students with loads of homework, make them toil endlessly and occasionally punish them. Exploring the famous 12th-century basilica on my only day off was considered a formative task.

I knew the church, as my dad used to work right opposite it, but until then, I had only seen it from the outside. This time, I walked there with my mum, and we descended into the underground, where the remains of a 4th-century, early Christian house of prayers were visible: this was where the Romans held their rites following Constantine’s edict, which apocryphally made Christianity the state religion. After the exploration, I spent the afternoon flipping through the encyclopedia to grasp a few more pieces of information. I learnt that the basilica is one of the pinnacles of Romanesque architecture with its beautiful mosaics, including the Triumph of the Cross. Thus I reported to class and amended my faults.

Two years later, the middle school teacher organised a field trip. ‘Let’s go to San Clemente!’ she announced. It wasn’t a sanction this time, but wasting a rare school trip on a place I had been before felt like it. To my surprise, I discovered that the church had not two but three levels and that the proto-Christians had built their temple upon a Roman structure from the first century CE, a private house or a shrine dedicated to Mithras. I didn’t even have peach fuzz on my chin yet, and concepts like religious syncretism and space-time relativism had bulldozed my innocence.

Four more years passed, and I sported a goatee and long, ’90s-style hair when my high-school art history professor quizzed me, you guessed it, on San Clemente. I knew enough, if not a lot. I was confident until he threw me a curveball. ‘Why is the church important in the history of our language?’ he asked. I was stumped. Two and a half visits weren’t enough to learn that in the church there’s an inscription from the year 1000-something, showing a patrician giving orders to plebeians, urging them to pull a heavy column. It reads – who could ever forget it – ‘Fili de le pute, traite’, loosely ‘Pull it, you sons of bitches’. 

On a historical and linguistic level, the articulated preposition ‘de le’ captures a moment in the evolution of the spoken idiom, showing that for centuries, Romans no longer expressed themselves in Latin and not yet in Italian. On an anthropological and cultural level, that ‘pute’ proves that my compatriots have never had qualms about expressing themselves colourfully, with gestures or swear words carved in stone. In a church, no less. 

But the most enduring lesson came on a personal level: no matter how many times you visit a church, there’s no way you’ll know it inside out. For the record, Italy has an oversupply of churches, at least 64,000 of them. Plus, there are more than 3000 museums, art galleries, archaeological sites and other cultural institutions. As of 2024, the country boasts 60 UNESCO World Heritage Sites, the highest number for any single nation. Good luck thinking you can see all of Italy, let alone know it, or talk about it. Having said that, I’m going to try.

In other words, I wrote this: