Padova train station 20.34 Sunday evening
The darkness has started to descend and the people on the platform increasingly have to rely on the florescent lights above. The sky is turning an azurian blue but keeps exploding into a sea of white as the lightning crosses the heaven. No rain though, at least not yet. Announcements of delayed trains are read out every other minute and people are pacing restlessly along the platform. The wind blowing in from the direction of the thunderstorm seems much more real than any of the concrete and steal that surrounds me. Sleek silver trains glide in and out of the station with a singing noise announcing its modernity. Whilst old regional ones screech to a halt at their platforms and coughing attempt to leave again. A loud thunderclap is echoes through the station and for a brief moment everyone freezes with their eyes directed towards the sky as if they first now have noticed the raving storm above. Clearly the thunder and lightning that is so real to me is merely filtered as background accompaniment by my fellow travellers amassing below orange glowing billboards. In a brief moment the sky has turned from azure blue to a dark, almost grey blue, and the rain starts to fall. The smell of the water hitting the stones below the tracks is enticing. It is both sweet and musty with a tang of metal mixed in from the tracks. I wait patiently as a train to Milano passes by, my night train to Paris still remarkably absent. Melancholy as I feel upon my approaching departure from Italy I have to admire the display before me and I could not have asked for a better send off, on my way as I am, to the city of light.
