The plane touches down at Fiumicino, and I feel the small guilt every traveller should feel and few admit to: I’ve just burned my share of the sky to get here. Two flights, in and out, the unavoidable bookends of a year abroad. Everything in between was mine to choose. I chose rails.
My first Italian train pulls out of Roma Termini at 6:14am, and within minutes the graffiti scrawled suburbs give way to something older; cypress trees standing like exclamation marks on hillsides that have watched a thousand years of travellers pass through. No airport queues, no liquids in clear bags, just a window, an espresso from the trolley, and the country unspooling past the glass.
I go to Florence, watch the sky turn gold at dusk. To Naples, where the train slows just enough to catch Vesuvius holding its breath over the bay. South to Bari and the Amalfi coast, north to Milan and Venice, each journey stitched together by steel rails instead of jet fuel, a few hundred grams of CO2 per kilometre instead of a few hundred more. Sounds like a footnote. Multiplied across a year of weekend trips, it isn’t.
There’s a particular arrogance in flying between cities reachable by train in three hours paying more, in money and emissions, to skip the view. Italy’s rail network, one of Europe’s best, makes that arrogance easy to resist; Trenitalia and Italo crisscross the peninsula fast enough that flying starts to look like waste.
None of this makes me a model of perfect sustainability. I flew in, and I’ll fly out. But sustainability was never about purity; it’s about the small choices between the ones you can’t avoid. Every train ticket instead of a boarding pass was a vote for SDG 13, climate action measured in transport emissions. Every city reached by rail rather than skipped over from above was a small act of SDG 11 engaging with places as living systems, not just destinations.
By the time my last train pulls into Roma Termini before the flight home, I’ve crossed the country more times than I can count, almost entirely under diesel and electric wire instead of altitude. The plane gets me home faster; the trains let me actually see the country I came to study in.
I didn’t expect Rome to get under my skin the way it did. There’s a particular magic in walking to lectures past 2,000-year-old ruins. But it wasn’t the grand things I’ll miss most, it’s the small ones: the espresso ritual before morning classes, the way the city sounds different at golden hour, friendships built in a second language and broken English, somehow understanding each other anyway. Studying abroad taught me how much of myself I could build somewhere unfamiliar, and how quietly a place becomes home without you noticing. I left Italy with a suitcase heavier with books and lighter with certainty about who I was before I got there. All roads lead to Rome.
