Jolt, creak, jolt. The train was curving around the lower Alps and shook me out of my sleep. In the bunk above me, my teenager George snuffled and slept on, determined not to be disturbed by the wondrous sight of the morning’s first light hitting the mountains.
The sleep was deserved: we had been living out of backpacks for the last week, our Interrail passes now heavily inked with train times and stamps, and we were both feeling a bit ragged.
We would be pulling into Venice’s Santa Lucia station in a couple of hours. I went to find the steward to beg for coffee, and returned to my bunk and my copy of The Radetzky March, Joseph Roth’s exquisite tragicomic novel on the end of the Austro-Hungarian empire.