Soggiorno Italiano

Alvega-Ortiga

Journeys invariably unsettle me, especially the ones undertaken alone. I am thrilled at the prospect of travel, excited with the anticipation of seeing new places and meeting fresh faces.And if I am forced to stay at one place for a few days at a stretch like it was in Mação, I grow morose and dull. But invariably, the night before the trip panic sets in. And I wish I could stay on where I am and not budge.

Sure enough, after the first half an hour into the trip things are back to normal. But here I am at the beginning of the half an hour pulling my bag across the rails on to the platform of Alvega- Ortiga station on my way to Italy. The mood is enhanced by the wind and the cold. The platform is deserted, there is an eerie silence except for the distant barks of a dog. The moon is so large today that it looks artificial and the platform is bathed in moonlight.

Sitting there I think of my last trip to Italy almost a year ago. That night also I sat on the same bench wondering if I was stuck in time- this deserted toy station,the ruins of the old factory in shadows, dog barks, the broken clock. In the last one year the clock hands have changed an hour. As then, today also I think of a ghost train full of pearly white people who walk right through me as if I did not exist.

Then once again life is back to normal. Or as normal as it could be sitting in a train compartment with only yourself. I am heading to Ferrara- a town in Northern Italy. Here, I will be for the next three months fulfilling the mobility requirements of my masters program. I hear that the lessons are to be in Italian. But I am emboldened by listening to all those lectures in Portuguese over the last one year. Nothing can turn me back!

The trip

The first part of the trip was to be same as the one before- I take a cab to Lisbon airport, sleep at the airport and fly to Milan the next morning to catch a train from the central station. But this time there was a change. The security was tighter at both the airports. At Milan's Malpensa, men in uniform were in fact standing at the exit with dogs on the leash that sniffed at the passengers and bared their teeth menacingly.The guards stopped each passenger with an African phenotype checking their passports and questioning them while the rest were allowed to pass through the doors, without so much as a glance. Here is Europe's way to react to the people's movement in the neighbouring continent!

I feel more comfortable traveling in Italy than in Portugal. For all the growth of the right wing here, there are lesser people who stare at you on the streets even in the villages.Or it seems so till now. And when it comes to help it is reflexive. So after my heavy trunk was comfortably settled on a top rack by three pairs of hands, I sit down to watch through the train window. And sure enough, I fall asleep, with my mouth slightly ajar and I should assume my head bouncing from side to side, for when I open my eyes the old man seated across is eying me with an amused smile.

Out of the window, the landscape is strikingly different from the blue snow caped Alps of last year. The relief is flat, so flat that it looked like a sheet of felt paper with patches of bright green and brown. the buildings are in an ill-assortment of shapes and colours that are by rule dull. The trees are oddly colourless; it is as if the palette ran out of green and the trees were all left as pencil sketches.

So here I am after a three hour train ride and two flights of steps with my stupid heavy bag that set my faint heart in drum roll, outside the Ferrara station and shaking hands with Cecilia. Cecilia is a doctoral student in archaeology from the university of Ferrara. She will take me and my bag to the apartment that she found for me which is to be my home for the next three months.