I recently traveled to Italy and back overland, seeking an alternative to the usual high-speed Paris-Milan service, which had been blocked for many months due to a landslip. But fortunately (like a more positive version of the poem ‘We’re going on a bear hunt’), when looking for alternative ways to cross the Alpine massif, then there definitely are other ways to go over it, under it and around it.
The ‘around it’ route in case would have involved to the south of France and then along the coast to Italy. But French holiday travel precluded us from getting tickets on the fast French sections. And so we opted for going outbound ‘over it’ via the Bernina Express, and homebound ‘under it’ via the Gotthard Base tunnel.
The Bernina Express really is the scenic way to cross the Alps. From the eastern Swiss town of Chur, the train corkscrews up inside mountains, zigzags across steep slopes and leaps over more than a hundred viaducts. This narrow-gauge railway turns impossibly narrow curves so that you regularly see the trailing end of the train out of the windows when you sit at the front. At the top of the Bernina Pass, over 2000 metres up, glaciers hang overhead in valleys above, and mineral water in lakes reflect the mountain-scape in technicolor. The descent begins where we cross the watershed between the Danube (leading to the Black Sea) and the Po (heading to the Adriatic) – two very different destinies for a raindrop. The descent feels steeper than the rise, with our destination of Tirano tantalisingly close in the valley below but the switchbacks and spirals taking over an hour to complete.
Crossing over the border into Italy at the very end of the line feels like an achievement. And even though we have spent the last four hours sitting down, travelling this way you really get a sense of what an awesome barrier the Alps are right in the middle of Europe. How over the centuries trade might have travelled along these passes, and the advantages to the people able to make the route faster.
Top tip – the Bernina Express terminus and the Trenitalia station, for onward travel, are on two sides of a town square. The other two sides are occupied by cafes that will do you a delicious meal of pasta and leave you plenty of time to make your connection.
Tomorrow – ‘going under it’, via the Gotthard Base tunnel.