The Frecciarossa

The flagship straightaway: out of Milano Centrale's great vault and flat across the Po valley at full service speed. Fog country in winter, heat-shimmer in June — and the food valley waiting at the far end.

Thirty-seven minutes, nearly all of it inside the mountains — a rosary of tunnels under the Apennines, the 18.5-kilometer Vaglia bore the longest bead. You enter in Emilia and surface in Tuscany, where the light is suddenly sharper.

Down the spine on the Direttissima — the line whose first section, opened in 1977, made Italy the first country in Europe with true high-speed rail. Umbrian hills, then the Tiber, then Termini and two thousand years of city.