Two decades ago Rachael Martin arrived in Italy, exploring the country by rail and dreaming of rooms with a view. Twenty years, one Italian husband and two kids later, she still has the memories of those first voyages of discovery…

The flat agricultural land of the Po Valley

Passing through Vercelli station

Pulling into Novara

Images by Rachael Martin

Piazza della Consolata and Caffè Al Bicerin

A bicerin and biscuits is one of those things you have to do in Turin

Café life on Via Po

Under the portico of Via Po, one of Turin’s most historic streets

A train journey from Milan to Turin provokes a Proustian moment in a famous old bar, not with tea and madeleines, but with bicerin and biscuits

Part Four – To Turin

Life on the train today consists of a group of Spanish students, various young people and a middle-aged woman who asks if the seat opposite me is free. We’re at Porta Garibaldi station in the north of Milan, near the trendy Isola district and Porta Nuova with its skyscrapers. We pull out of the station towards familiar sights. It’s that postindustrial landscape I find strangely comforting. There are the allotments, the rubbish dumps, and still it continues, that built-up sprawl with the usual graffiti and warehouses and grass between the railway lines, and it is still beautiful.