That's when he found the 1998 Alfa Romeo 146 in perfect working order with 110,000 km (68,000 miles) for €600. The catch? It was near Naples, 243 km (151 miles) away, which meant that we would have to decide whether or not to buy this car exclusively based on photos and communication with the seller and that, if deciding to buy it, we would then have to dedicate a day to going down there and bringing it home, taking into account the possibility that something could still change our minds upon arrival. After much back and forth we decided to go for it and to turn it into a fun day trip as well. This is the story that I am about to tell you...
Friday was the big day. My mother's apartment in Rome was available for us to crash in the night before so that we could get up painfully early and take one of the first trains down, arriving with ample time to test drive the car and legally complete the sale at the appropriate offices before they closed for the day at noon. We got up at 4:30 am, put the apartment back into rentable condition, forced some breakfast into our tired tummies, and at roughly 5:20am ventured out. We needed to be at Stazione Tiburtina for the 6:17am train to Caserta. For all of our planning ahead and maximization of what little sleeping time there was available to us, we had been a trifle careless regarding how we would be getting to that particular train station at an hour of the day in which not only is public transportation scarce, but so, as it turns out, are taxis. We proceeded to make every wrong decision.
I have to admit that I take taxis so rarely that I often forget how different the taxi system in Rome is from that in New York. In NY whatever the time of day, whatever the area, you will always find a taxi within about ten seconds of turning to face the oncoming traffic and lifting your arm upwards (possibly a bit longer if it's raining). Not so in Rome. If you try to hail one of the few taxis on the street, it will almost definitely already be occupied or will be off duty. That's because contrary to NY, the streets of Rome are not rivers of white (taxis in Rome are white as opposed to the classic yellow of NY). The cab driver union, or some such thing, puts a cap on the number of taxis in circulation, driving up the cost of a ride and increasing salaries for the drivers. I guess this ultimately renders cab drivers less competitive amongst themselves and so less desperate for a fare and more likely to just park and wait for customers to come to them. Well, it works. So if you feel like splurging on a taxi, your best bet is to locate a big cluster of taxis, with their cabbies milling about on the sidewalk, smoking cigarettes and chatting with their colleagues. Then whichever of them feels like it or has been there the longest gets the next fare. As an alternative, you can also call a hotline to have a taxi come and get you directly where you are, but in that case there's a charge for the call and the meter starts running from the moment the taxi leaves wherever it previously was. That means you start your ride with at least €5 to €8 already on the meter! So if you need a taxi, you suck it up and walk to the nearest taxi cluster. At 5:30am we didn't want to risk it with public transportation, knowing that there can sometimes be a half hour wait between buses at that time. Luckily my mother's apartment is a five minute walk from Stazione Trastevere, where there are always at least a dozen taxis lined up and waiting directly in front of the main entrance. Apparently not at 5:30am. As a tram rumbled past us, we ran to the nearest (and we soon found out only) taxi in the parking lot just as the driver was stamping out a cigarette butt and closing his door. When asked if he could take us to the station he shook his head and smiled apologetically. He had just gone off duty.
As far as we knew, this was no cause for alarm as we were only about 20 meters from the entrance to the station and assumed that on the other side of the sea of parked cars in front of us we would surely find at least ten taxis eager to take us wherever we wanted to go. Clumsily sacrificing our hip bones on the side mirrors of numerous cars as we scuttled our way to the entrance, we soon discovered that this was not the reality. And that's when we started to get a little worried. Obviously having assumed that we would be taking a taxi to the station we had left the apartment according to a certain time frame...a time frame that rendered public transportation unrealistic. Our most viable option continued to be a taxi and so our next goal was to get to another taxi hotbed.
Having ignored the tram of several minutes earlier and with no reliable way of knowing when the next would pass, we got on the bus which was already waiting out front and, amazingly, it left after only about another minute. The plan was to take it to the nearest metro stop (please remember to call it “the metro” and not “the subway”; a “subway” is the literal translation used for “sottopassaggio” which is an underpass) where, if we were lucky, we could first check to see if the first train of the day would pass in time to take us directly to the station or, if the world worked the way it normally does, we would otherwise be able to find a taxi.
Now, another element of city life that I had always taken for granted in NY was the convenience and reliability of the subway system's 24 hour grid. After ten years I had learned how to play its game with studied efficiency: the most convenient transfers, which train car would leave me closest to my exit, how to leap frog a local with an express... I have developed no such technique here in Rome as I almost never take the metro. Yes the buses are confusing and somewhat inefficient, but with only two meager metro lines crossing Rome in a giant X, it's hardly the most convenient way for me to travel. So before Friday, I had possibly never before been affected by the fact that the system shuts down from 12:30-5:30am. We walked into the station at around 5:40, technically after the official start of service. However if the first train has left the first stop at 5:30 that doesn't mean that it will be where we need it to be by 5:40. We asked the guard at what time the first train going in our direction usually passed and he gave a very ambiguous answer of “Um...I'm not sure. Maybe in another ten minutes.” After a quick calculation of 5:40, plus a ten minute wait, plus a ten to fifteen minute ride, plus finding the ticket counter at the station, plus purchasing the tickets and finding the track... it was a little too close for comfort (and incidentally a similar calculation is the reason why we had decided the day before that it would be a better idea to take a taxi).
Once again, we went out front and once again there were no taxis to be seen. What had begun as a slight nagging worry was creeping not-so-slowly to full fledged alarm. Running out of options, we started walking to Stazione Ostiense, another five minutes away and another relatively big station where we were nonetheless increasingly less sure of finding the much needed taxi. Of course as we were walking away and already past the point of frantically running back, we heard the metro pull into the station... and leave. For our own sanity we chose to imagine that it was the train going in the opposite direction, but secretly we both knew that that probably wasn't the case.
Stazione Ostiense: our third station of the pre-dawn morning and by far the most desolate. As we approached, like a distant and taunting mirage, a shiny white cab sped by outside of the periphery of the parking lot...and then it was gone as quickly as it had appeared. Not surprisingly, there were no other cabs in sight though several buses were lined up about to start their routes. My husband, in a final desperate attempt at public transportation, thought that perhaps from this station there could possibly be a train that made a stop at Stazione Tiburtina, or even maybe Caserta directly... No and no. We were completely out of ideas as we wandered back through the main lobby, empty apart from the standard unsavory-train-station-characters, and were starting to consider the possibility (and necessity) of taking the later train from Stazione Termini (which would leave us with an uncomfortably short amount of time to test drive the car and complete the paperwork) or of simply rescheduling for another day. But we weren't quite ready to give up on our 6:17am train. Not yet.
Not knowing what else to do we found ourselves veering towards the buses. They were not routes that we were particularly familiar with and as we wondered which to take, two of them shut their doors and departed right in front of us, encouraging us not-so-subtly to make a decision. Unenthusiastically we got on one at random and asked the bus driver what his general route was and if he knew of taxi stands along the way. He told us to try in front of the station... No comment.
As luck would have it, the first stop on his route took us past the same metro station mentioned earlier, where suddenly there were about seven taxis lined up and where if we had just waited a moment longer in the first place we could have saved ourselves a good ten minutes of anxiety. So we clambered off the bus and booked it to the nearest one. Ah the relief of sitting in a moving vehicle, speeding through the deserted streets of Rome in August at 6am, wizzing past the Colosseum still lit up by the night time flood lights, and in no time at all arriving at our very own personalized destination.
You think the adventure ends here, but unfortunately it does not.
We still had about ten minutes to spare before our train, but we didn't feel we could relax until the tickets were in our hands and the track was in site. Stazione Tiburtina has been under renovation for quite some time, so scaffolding and roped off areas make it a bit more challenging to get your bearings and find your way around. Even so, we managed without too much difficulty to find the ticket counter, which turned out to be inexplicably and unapologetically closed, forcing us to blunder our way through the neighboring ticket machines. Finally, with tickets in hand, we headed in the direction of the tracks. The only indication we saw pointed us towards tracks 24 and 25. Not yet knowing what track we needed we helplessly followed the arrows in that direction, hoping that something would soon be made clear. Almost immediately we did indeed find the digital display with its constantly changing arrivals, departures, and track numbers. (At this point it occurred to me that there may even have been a train directly from Stazione Trastevere to this station here, but we preferred not to dwell on that.) Every train had either a 24 or a 25 next to it. Only when we located our train and scanned horizontally to see its corresponding track number we found, instead of the expected number, “CAN”. “Canceled” or “Cancellato”... different languages, same abbreviation. You would think that, having purchased our tickets only two minutes prior, the stupid machine would have known that the train was canceled. You might further think that somewhere in the entire station one might find a human being employed to assist travelers who have just wasted €26 for seats on a non-existent train. As it happens, you would be wrong on both counts.
Not wanting to reschedule and sacrifice another day, we grudgingly accepted that we would have to take the later train from Termini at 8:20am and be rushed upon arrival in Caserta. We couldn't help but resent the extra two hours of sleep that we had lost as well as the €15 wasted on a totally unnecessary cab ride.
From Stazione Tiburtina we took the metro B line to Stazione Termini, fully ready to demand that we be put on the next train to Caserta at no extra cost. We were not hopeful that this would be granted. In fact we were pretty sure that they would force us to purchase new tickets and then have us mail the other ones in along with a complaint form for reimbursement by mail. But we were tired and cranky and maybe kind of looking for a fight.
Customer Assistance was, despite a big sign saying open 24 hours, closed. Big freakin' surprise. So I plopped myself on the already long line in front of the open (!!!) ticket counter while my husband looked around for someone assist-full. Instead he noticed someone starting to move around and organize things at the customer assistance desk and so I went there to join him. In that two seconds of wasted time we had already become third in line. Plus, that brief moment of activity had clearly been a red herring because as the minutes passed, the sliding glass door remained infuriatingly closed. Every so often someone on the other side of the glass wall would meander over to the desk, raising the hopes of everyone, and then meander back away, leaving us all more restless and disgruntled than before.
In the mean time the line had continued to grow behind us and people were not only glaring at the employees on the other side of the door while exaggeratedly indicating invisible wrist watches, but were starting to lash out verbally at their fellow in-need-of-assistance line companions. Now I realize that it can't be very appealing to whomever has the job of dealing with pissed off customers to open the barricade and let the avalanche of complaining cascade in. That person has to deal, day after day, with anger being directed at him/her for something that he/she has nothing to do with and I appreciate that that job must really suck. But when these people allow the customers' frustration to ferment even further by opening blatantly and lackadaisically late, then they deserve what's waiting for them on the other side just a little bit.
Finally a middle aged woman seated herself at the desk and pulled out a remote control to open the automated sliding door. She pointed it at the door and, in the most anticlimactic way, nothing happened. Unphased, she pantomimed a request for assistance to the first customer on line who started desperately trying to pry it open, like he was on a stuck elevator dangling twelve floors above ground level, before, with a collective sigh of relief, the doors gracefully slid open and he plowed his way in. Luckily the line moved relatively quickly, though as the American woman ahead of us left I caught a just barely audible “fucking bitch” uttered under her breath. I feared that this did not bode well, but tried not to enter with a negative attitude. I let my husband do the talking.
“Hi there. We bought these tickets for the 6:17am train from Stazione Tiburtina from a machine at the station and then found out that the train was canceled.”
“It wasn't canceled. It left from here,” she responded taking the tickets from my husband's outstretched hand to confirm the situation.
“But I checked the times on the website and it told me Stazione Tiburtina. That's also what printed out on the ticket.”
“Well Stazione Tiburtina has been closed for a month due to renovations,” she continued casually as she typed a few things into her computer.
“How would I know that if I don't ever take the train and both the website and the ticket machine are wrong?” he responded doing his best to maintain an ironic and pleasant sense of humor in the face of totally illogical adversity.
She shrugged. “I can put you on the next train, which leaves at 8:20 and arrives at 10:36,” she said while making (hopefully official) notes on the tickets. Then she thought for a moment and looked something else up. “Or you can take the 7:39 train which has one transfer but will get you in about an hour earlier.” That's the option we chose, sort of kicking ourselves for not having known about that option in the first place. All things considered, apart from the incomprehensible failure to update the website and the ticket machines after an entire month of schedule changes, customer assistance managed to come through for us. And so we boarded our train and hoped that the rest of the day would be a bit less Italian...
*If you are the copyright holder of one of the photos used in this post please contact me if you wish for it to be removed.
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