Scenes From the Raffelo Express : Destination: Switzerland & Italy : Hailing the rails, where quintessential European countryside glides by on a quick but relaxing journey

A six-day trip to Europe seemed next to ridiculous but it was my fate: three days in Florence, one in Zurich, and two days flying back and forth between here and there. But I was going over on business, had to be back in California to supervise the move into our new home, and that was that.

The business was this: My old friend Hannes Keller, who lives in Zurich, is an amateur but extremely talented pianist. On a lark, I had organized some California concert dates for him to play with the American Youth Symphony, conducted by Mehli Mehta, the venerated 86-year-old conductor from Los Angeles.

Mehta and his orchestra were performing in Florence, Italy, and Hannes had flown me to Europe so that I could introduce him to Mehta in Florence. I would join Hannes in Zurich and we would jump on a train to Florence, and this would give us a chance for eight hours of scheming, telling jokes and talking philosophy, quantum mechanics and Mozart.

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What I didn’t realize was that this train trip would also give me, in my short, allotted time, the relaxed pleasure of being in Europe. I could sit and slow down in the middle of a racing schedule, talk to my friend as we slid from Switzerland to Italy while watching 300 miles of countryside unfold outside our window. I would realize that the eight hours it takes to go from Zurich to Florence by rail is a way to experience Europe in microcosm, a vacation unto itself.

Europe is known for its wonderful trains with romantic-sounding names such as the Orient Express, Bernina Express, Glacier Express--and then there is the Raffaelo Express, named for the Italian Renaissance painter Raphael and proudly attached to the route between Zurich and Rome. The trip is not well known by this name, and if you ask the Rail Europe office or the Swiss National Tourist office, or even the ticketing agents in the Zurich train station for the “Raffaelo Express,” there’s a good chance they may not know what you are talking about. It is simply the train that runs daily between Zurich and Rome, leaving Zurich at 8:03 a.m., arriving in Florence at 3:53 p.m. and in Rome at 5:55 p.m.

Nevertheless, this elegant train ride lives up to every bit of its rarely used romantic title, for it is a work of art in itself. As Hannes and I boarded the train in the cavernous Zurich train station just before 8 o’clock on a recent summer morning, I remembered this same train from nearly 30 years ago; I had been in Europe in 1967 on a fact-gathering mission for a book about Hannes, and had taken the Raffaelo Express all the way to Rome.

Aboard the train, Hannes and I found our first-class car, a glass-enclosed cabin with comfortable, roomy couch seats for six passengers, three on either side of a big picture window. We had the car to ourselves for a time, which was fortunate for all unsuspecting passengers who might not care for our raucous, nonstop conversation and joking. Soon after we settled in, we made our way to the dining car where for two hours we sat at a white-clothed table to share an elegant light breakfast of prosciutto, different kinds of cheeses, rolls, bread and fruits. Although it was only 9 a.m. we decided to have some champagne to salute the odd business venture we were embarking on as well as our 30-year friendship and our respective wonderful spouses who didn’t mind us making this day trip from Zurich to Florence together.

While we ate, drank and talked, the Swiss countryside slid by our window like a Cinerama movie, a constantly changing panorama of green-forested hills dotted with ponds and lakes, roving cows and neat Swiss chalets with colorful flowers in window boxes. A gentle waiter in a black waistcoat came by with hot caffe latte , first pouring hot milk into our cups from a ceramic pitcher, then strong Italian coffee from a silver one. As we lingered over the coffee and the champagne, the Lepontine Alps lifted us up into clouds and jagged peaks and we slid past lakes, bridges, rivers, towns and train stations with interesting names that became progressively more Italian as we approached the border.

In the distance, a lake. We were pulling into Zug. “Zook,” Hannes said, or something like that, pronouncing it authentically. “At the railway station we will see South American generals with suitcases full of money. . . . Low taxes here, very low, lower than Zurich . . . a lot of international companies have letter boxes here, with millions in those letter boxes.”

Hannes has a letter box in Zug for his computer software firm in Zurich. My old friend is a Swiss version of the mad scientist, a mathematical genius with unruly hair, a Cheshire cat smile and mischievous eyes that crinkle up when he laughs about the next wild scheme he has in mind.

In the Zug train station I saw no South American generals. People came aboard and we rolled on. With the flower boxes and red-roofed hamlets of the Zuger See fading into the background, the train began to wind along the east shore of Lake Lucerne and soon we were climbing into a rugged mountain pass between two sets of Alps, the Bernese and Glarner. Near the St. Gotthard tunnel we started a series of sharp turns around a church at Wassen.

“Look,” Hannes said. “We will see this church three times from different levels.” I stared out the window, wondering how this train could circle a church three times when there were no spiraling tracks to be seen. But it was true, the church appeared this way and that way and then another, and then we entered a dark tunnel that took us under the Alps.

Back in the light, Hannes happily recalled a piano recital he and a business associate had given the previous summer at the Schwarzenberg Palace in Vienna. We talked about Vienna as a center of brave new ideas. “Everyone crazy is a professor, and they get away with it there because they’re hoping for another Freud,” Hannes said. “Freud was nuts. He tied everything to the libido. That’s simply not true. You can’t explain human nature with scientific laws. You know, 90% of America believes we have to be 100% harmonic to fit into society. This is wrong, not possible. As a consequence, people are not happy, don’t fit in. Get another psychologist, get a third. Woody Allen has five!”

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Looking out the window, Hannes now made a connection to physics. “You know, a perfect circle does not exist in nature; an ideal circle cannot be drawn by computer, compass, whatever. We should not see things in relation to an ideal circle, because it doesn’t exist.”

So it went. At Bellinzona, I saw Lake Maggiore in the distance. In 1961, Hannes had made a dive in a suit with a helmet to 728 feet in this lake, an event covered by Life magazine in which he and Life writer Ken MacLeish were lowered on a diving stage to this unprecedented depth while breathing a complicated series of gases. They reached the bottom in record time: seven minutes, 30 seconds. That dive had led to Hannes’ epic, world-shattering dive, in a bell, to 1,000 feet off Catalina Island, Calif., in 1962, which was the reason a New York publisher had wanted a book about his life.

We got up from the dining table. Our bill of fare for the elegant breakfast was about $9 each. Re-establishing ourselves in our first-class car, we sat in our lovely lounge chairs on either side of the picture window, and before long a beautiful lake came into view. Along the shore were lovely villas: old, thick, elegant and cracked, their red tile roofs clustered among olive and cypress trees with an occasional palm here and there. A hot, soft summer haze blended blue sky and glassy lake into a soft Italian wash. This was Lake Lugano.

At the border town of Chiasso, passports were checked aboard the train, and we proceeded toward Como.

At this point in our trip the transformation from Swiss to Italian countryside was complete: The neat, flower-trimmed chalets of the Swiss had been replaced by stucco farmhouses surrounded by grapevines and olive trees. The Lombardy district of northern Italy is a patchwork of green and golden fields, and Lodi, which we now observed outside our window, is a rich diary district that produces the cheeses everyone associates with Italy--especially Parmesan. Milan was only a few miles from here, I knew, capital of Lombardy and home of La Scala opera house, which I dream of experiencing one day.

Hannes began to discuss an idea for a novel, something about Michelangelo’s baby that was to begin with Michelangelo going to a barber for a haircut, when we arrived at Piacenza and crossed the Po River. This river, about which I’d read so much in history books as a schoolgirl, dominates northern Italy in its path from a torrential source in the Italian Alps to where it empties into the Adriatic Sea just below Venice. From the train window the Po River valley appeared a vast and flat farmland dotted by vineyards and groves of cypress and olive trees. We were about 36 miles away from Parma.

At lunchtime we returned to the dining car, where the tables had been reset and the waiters as well as the menu switched from Swiss to Italian. For this midday meal we would have all the time in the world (a feature of the trip I was beginning to love immensely), so we ordered an antipasti to start and again shared some champagne. After that we slowly savored a three-course lunch that consisted of a lovely salate (salad) followed by a delicious penne pasta in a light Milanese-type sauce. Then, a chicken piccata with a small bottle of red wine. The fare for all this amounted to about $14 each. Because the train system is heavily subsidized by government, the dining car fares, as well as the fares for the trip itself, are relatively inexpensive; our first-class fare from Zurich to Florence was $129 each, one way.

We lingered, wonderfully, over lunch for two hours, floating through Parma, birthplace of the great conductor Arturo Toscanini, and crossing the Po River into a grain-and-cattle countryside that produces Parmesan cheese and the “Parma” ham more commonly known as prosciutto. Where I live, a few slices of prosciutto requires a bank loan, so when Hannes bought his wife, Esther, the good part of an entire prosciutto ham from La Norcineria, a meat shop in Florence, for about $20, I wanted to hide some of it in my luggage.

About 30 miles after Parma we pulled into Modena (pronounced MA-dna), where Ferrari cars are manufactured and where the wonderful tenor Luciano Pavarotti lives--and although I couldn’t leave the train to experience Ferrari, Pavarotti or the canal-lined streets of the city, it was enough, for the purposes of this trip, to get a sense of geography and place of the Emilia-Romagna region we were in.

It was the same with Bologna, capital of Emilia-Romagna, home of typically Italian sausages such as mortadella and bologna, and of Raphael’s wonderful St. Cecilia chapel. Somewhere beyond the sight of the train station was Guglielmo Marconi’s birthplace, many museums filled with Etruscan and Roman antiquities, and the famous university, whose students have included Dante and Petrarch. We were now at the foot of the Apennines and 82 miles north of Florence.

By the time Hannes and I returned to our lounge car, the train was climbing the Apennines, and about an hour after that we arrived in Florence, the glorious end of our trial.

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After two whirlwind days of music and Michelangelo and other immortal artists of the Renaissance, after Ghiberti’s “Gate of Paradise,” Giotto’s bell tower, the Medici chapels and Botticelli’s “Venus,” after wonderful meals in Tuscan restaurants and adventurous shopping for suedes and tiles, after peeking in the fantastically rich windows of Gucci, Pucci and Ferragamo, and after strolling along the Arno and many times across the Ponte Vecchio--and after introducing Hannes to Mehli Mehta in the lobby of the Excelsior Hotel and hearing the American Youth Symphony play Tchaikovsky and Richard Strauss so beautifully in the Teatro Communale, Hannes and I climbed aboard the same train the third night at 11 p.m.

This time around, the lounge cars had been turned into sleepers, with comfortable beds in bunk-bed arrangements, each car with private toilets and basins and supplied with a bit of Italian wine, some fruit and light snacks. Exhausted from our action-packed days in Florence, Hannes and I talked only a little while before he turned in for the night, but my mind was too filled with recent experiences to sleep and so I talked in the hallway with the night watchman for nearly two hours. When I found my bunk at about 1 a.m. I was asleep by the time I put my head on the pillow. Back at my home in California only two days after that, the images of my six days in Europe swirled around in my mind, and I could not help but feel as if I might just possibly still be dreaming in my private little night bunk on the Raffaelo Express.

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GUIDEBOOK

Getting Aboard

Raffaelo Express

Getting there: Round-trip LAX to Zurich fares begin at about $810 with 21-day advance purchase. Fly direct on Swissair or American; connecting service on American, Delta, United, Lufthansa, KLM, British Air and Air France.

The train: First-class fare to Florence is $129 one-way, second class $80; first-class, one-way fare to Rome is $163, second class $102. The return night trip (sleeper car) leaves Rome at 9 p.m., Florence at 11:46 p.m., and arrives in Zurich at 8:57 a.m. The fare for a double, first-class sleeper room is $80 per person added to the first-class fare, from either Rome or Florence to Zurich.

Tickets for the Zurich-Florence-Rome trip can be purchased at the Zurich train station, or in advance as part of a Rail Europe “Europass” package for $280 for five days of travel that must be completed within two months. Call Rail Europe at (800) 438-7245 or (800) 848-7245. For more information: Call or write the Swiss National Tourist Office, 222 N. Sepulveda Blvd., Suite 1570, El Segundo 90245; tel. (310) 335-5980.