Italian trains

The complete Italian train schedule looks like a miniature phone book, it's 500+ pages of detailed charts, maps and symbols and is available at most newsstands for 4.50 Euros. It was intimidating at first, but we quickly figured out how to decipher most of the various codes and icons. We've gotten pretty good at moving around by train. There are the usual idiosyncrasies (Among other things, we discovered i festivi (holidays) sometimes means "holidays" but sometimes it just arbitrarily means "weekends"). Beyond that, though, we're very impressed with how efficient the train system is here. It's an incredibly large and sophisticated network that has thousands of arrivals and departures planned down to the minute over hundreds of stations and hubs. And, many small-town stations only have one or two tracks, which I assume requires an additional amount of coordination to manage the flow.