Italy's sleeper from Milan to Sicily ends with a rare rail-ferry crossing that's threatened by a new mega bridge.
Our ferry cuts through the roiling waters of the Strait of Messina under clouds that blanket all but the hems of Sicily's distant mountains. The sea passage to the Italian island doesn't want for drama. It's governed by tidal currents so strong they inspired Scylla and Charybdis, the sea monsters in Homer's Odyssey, and is overseen by a golden statue of the Madonna at the end of Messina Harbour, arm raised in blessing. But my eye is drawn to a stranger sight: the train carriages travelling across the sea on the ferry itself.
This is unique cargo. The narrow strait is the only place in Europe where passenger trains still travel by sea. Every morning, passengers aboard the Intercity Notte follow the same ritual: watching the train split in the southern Italian city of Villa San Giovanni, get shunted onto the ferry’s tracks and carried across to the city of Messina before being reassembled for the final run to Palermo or Syracuse.
"It is a small engineering choreography that keeps two shores and two worlds together every day: students, workers, families returning home, strait commuters, tourists who choose the slow pace of the night train," Francesca Serra, director of Intercity operations at national operator Trenitalia, tells me.
But this choreography connecting land and sea may soon come to an end.
In August, the Italian government revived long-standing plans to build a vast €13.5bn (£11.7bn) suspension bridge over the strait – one of the world's most ambitious engineering projects. Supporters see it as progress, while critics warn it could drain resources from southern Italy's more urgent infrastructure needs. Whether or not it's ever built, the proposal has cast a shadow over one of Europe's most poetic journeys and the sense of ritual and connection it represents.