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// The first time I rode the Centovalli, one of Europe’s most beautiful railways, I almost missed my ride. Train-hopping in Switzerland, I’d taken a Milan-bound high-speed train from Brig to the southern end of the Simplon Tunnel. Disembarking in Domodossola, just across the Italian border, I made a dash for an underground platform, where I boarded the Centovalli Express just as the doors were sliding shut.
An experience, it turned out, that I would have regretted missing. Over the next two hours, the little cream-and-blue narrow-gauge train plunged into 31 tunnels, rattled across 83 bridges, and screeched through 348 bends, tantalizing me and a couple of hundred Italian-speaking day-trippers with glimpses of stone bridges arching over white-water rapids, bridal-veil falls, and gondolas rising towards villages perched on mountain-tops. Unlike such better-known Swiss trains as the Bernina Express and the Jungfrau Railway, the Centovalli doesn’t require you to reserve seats months in advance: the route isn’t on many tour itineraries, and tickets remain cheap. By the time the train approached the palm-tree-ringed lakeshore of Locarno, in the Swiss canton of Ticino, I’d already promised myself a more leisurely return visit.
A year later, I was back, determined to take my time. With fifteen departures a day, it’s possible to use the Centovalli as a hop-on, hop-off service, and I decided to disembark when the spirit moved me, overnighting in trackside hotels, and following well-marked trails into the hills.
This time, instead of dashing through Domodossola, I’ve booked a room at the Eurossola, a lovingly renovated hotel with a Michelin-starred restaurant on its ground floor (Atelier, where chef Giorgio Bartolucci serves up butter-rich Piedmont specialities). Long a gateway to Italy for travellers from the north, Domodossola gives me just the concentrated hit of Italianness I’m looking for. A path from the bustling Renaissance-era piazza in the town center, where I stop for a chinotto on ice, leads to the Sacro Monte, a pilgrimage route that dog-legs uphill past fifteen chapels containing life-size dioramas of Christ’s sufferings on the cross. Thus fortified with baroque iconography and a dose of Italian street life, I strolled across the street from my hotel to the train station, with plenty of time left to pick out a good seat on the 10:26 am departure of Train 53.
Part of the charm of the Vigezzina-Centovalli, as the railroad is officially known, is that you’re never quite sure what kind of train you’ll be on.
