The town of Enna is perched on top of a high, rocky cliff. Photo / Getty Images
A three-hour rail trip across Sicily gives Linda Herrick a glimpse of its ghost towns.
The timetable said the train would leave at 9.28am. If you're an Aucklander who has lost faith in in timetables, take note: the Italians mean business.
The cliche was that Mussolini got Italy's trains running on time. It's a myth, put about during the 1930s to try to make the "efficiency" of Fascism more palatable, especially to foreigners.
But the 9.28am electric train from Palermo-Catania did leave bang on time, sliding quietly out of Stazione Centrale without any announcement whatsoever. It just left. Its unassuming punctuality was a thrill.
It's worth getting to the station a little earlier to admire its architecture, a grand building which opened in 1886 and serves as a hub to Messina, Trapani, Agrigento and Catania. But dawdling around the station was really just procrastination on my part.
British writer Tim Parks produced a very droll, slightly terrifying book in 2013 called Italian Ways, which explored the vagaries of travelling around Italy by train. To get a job in the Italian public service, including train company Trenitalia, was to have a job for life, a job so boring and stultifying that its employees - the ticket sellers, the conductors - occasionally viciously take it out on the passengers, especially tourists. The book filled me with fear, and heaven help me if I failed to "validate" my ticket. I didn't know what that meant.
So I approached the ticket sale office with caution. The immaculately costumed official, whose lofty demeanour epitomised everything that word means, charged 12.50. He handed me the change from an antiquated wooden tray of euros carefully lined up in slots, like bottle tops in a cutlery drawer, a manual task he presumably must perform each day. Then I "validated" the ticket, ie, pushed it into a machine on the platform (so easy) and jumped aboard.
It wasn't a very long train, with just a few carriages and no "classes". As it glided through the ugly, graffitied outer suburbs of Palermo, I gazed out of the window as my fellow travellers stared down at their cellphones. I remember travelling by train in Italy some years ago, before cellphones even existed. In those days, you could don earphones provided by the train and listen to Vivaldi. No such luxury anymore. This trip was accompanied by a cacophony of burping phones, loud conversations, the beeps of text messages. The elderly lady sitting across the fold-down table from me was constantly prodding her telefonino throughout the three-hour journey, crying, "Pronto! Pronto!" whenever we went out of range.
Outside, the train quickly left Palermo behind and we headed eastwards, with the glorious aquamarine Tyrrhenian Sea to our left. As we headed through the small town of Casteldaccia, a derelict, grand, old mansion stood overshadowed by hideous modern apartment buildings, the result of rampant real estate speculation which has reputedly ruined the place. The town now has nowhere for children to play outside.
Then we passed through Trabia, another town infested with vile apartment blocks encircled by a large old cemetery dotted with hundreds of crosses. We were now heading south and inland, about to cut a path through Sicily's central interior. The vertical rocky outcrops of the Riserva Naturale Orientata Pizzo Cane loomed up beside us. They looked like a great playground for rock climbers, or an excellent hideout for mafia bandits, which they probably were in days gone by. Across the aisle, an elderly couple, both skeletally thin, held hands as they snoozed.
Fiumetorto, which had a station that opened in 1869, is another Sicilian small town whose economic star has fallen. It was once a bustling community servicing a Fiat plant which closed. And then the motorway capacity was doubled. The station shut its doors in 2009. Now it is surrounded by concrete slabs and rusting metal.
But now we were coming into rich agricultural country, with crops of young corn thriving in fertile volcanic soil. Lemon trees, tomatoes, artichokes and fields of mandarin trees gave the fields the appearance of a brown and green patchwork quilt thrown over the land.
We reached the middle of undulating green pastures where the barren rockiness had receded. The train slipped past a barn with a cat in the window washing itself. Small groups of white cows grazed. Wind turbines dotted across the hilltops turned lazily and wheat became the predominant crop until we passed through a long tunnel and emerged into heavily cultivated farmland with groupings of more prosperous looking buildings and houses.
But Sicily is anything but consistent. We passed through Marianopoli, a township of 200 people, 609m (2000ft) above sea level, of which my notes say only: "derelict".
Then it was through a long tunnel for 10 minutes, emerging to hilly land covered with pines and Lombardy poplars, the quintessential Italian landscape.
The train stopped, for the first time in the journey, at Caltanissetta, a commune of about 60,000 which lies between three hills and occasionally suffers from the geological phenomenon known as the macalube, in which methane gas breaks through the soil, causing explosions of mud. Sulphur mining in the region has a dreadful history of explosions, fires and death.
On the tracks opposite our train was a tiny, two-carriage train, old, battered but still running. It was a rather poignant sight.
A young hipster entered the carriage with his fox terrier, which immediately went for another passenger's dog. After a short show-off bout of snarling and barking, it jumped up on a seat, went to sleep and we set off again.
More forlorn place names the train ignores: Villarosa ("derelict"); Seggio ("nothing there"). Then the most extraordinary sight: a circular town perched on top of a high, rocky cliff. How did people get up there? What was it? The station we stopped at gave the answer: Enna, a well-tended station with shrubs and trees. The station dog, a German shepherd, stepped across the tracks and - was I hallucinating? - looked right then left before proceeding.
With half an hour to go to Catania, the land was flattening out, becoming browner. The train zipped through an area which screamed failure: a massive complex of abandoned green houses with tattered plastic covers.
As we entered the Principale di Catania, the picture became more robust: wheatfields, olive trees, huge crops of artichokes. Then, suddenly, a busy motorway, and a huge Ikea billboard. We were reunited with the sea, this time the Ionian, and caught sight of an enormous dockside building, Casa Giardia: the Coast Guard. This is where many of the refugees fleeing Syria and Libya arrive by boat. We had reached Catania.
CHECKLIST
Getting there: Emirates flies daily from Auckland to Bologna. Low-cost carriers continue onwards to Palermo.
Details: For more information on rail journeys in Italy, go to trenitalia.com
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