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CiaoMilano .: Passante Porta Venezia
 
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When traveling by train through London or Paris, you may run into trouble switching from one station to another. You must get off your train, take your luggage with you, search for a subway or a taxi, get on it, and at long last settle down in another train. This is because when the big train stations of Europe were built, during the 19th century, every track coming from North, South, East or West stopped outside the city center.

Underground tracks
That was the state of the art, and Milan is no exception. Since the 1960s, however, the City Council has being digging tunnels under the city, so trains coming - say - from Paris (i.e. from the North) can comfortably go straight under the city center on their way to - say - Venice (East of Milan).
It sounds good, doesn't it? The only problem with this so-called Passante ferroviario (or "Railway Junction") system has been the longwindedness of each and every Italian authority involved.
The Passante has taken some thirty years to begin its operations, and only since December 1997 a first track of it has become available to the travellers. An extension to the an already existing railway station, Milano Certosa, began to operate in 1999. A really new urban station, Dateo, has opened in June 2002. Another, Porta Vittoria, in December 2004. More have followed.

What you can use right now
Every day from 6.40am to 8pm you can ride trains running from Bovisa railway station (in the northern section of Milan) to Porta Vittoria (not far from the city center) and vice versa. These trains are frequent, and take about twenty minutes to cover the distance. You can ride them free if you have already checked into the city's subway system or the Ferrovie Nord train network (which links the town to many places to the North, towards the Lakes).

New subway lines, in fact
Stations along the Passante like Porta Venezia or Repubblica are quite big, as they were designed for international traffic. To date, however, the first operational tracks of the Passante are nothing more than new lines in the Milan subway network.

Porta Venezia Passante station Passante station
.:. the huge stations of the Passante
.:. timetables of the Passante
(in Italian) at regione.lombardia.it
map of the Passante
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Kiwi, Milano
CiaoMilano is conceived and edited
by KIWI, Milano
.:. Monica Levy, who created this website, is no longer with us. Her smile is behind this word

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Creative Commons License .:. ciaomilano.it by KIWI, Milano is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Italy License
.:. copyright © 1997-2012 Roberto Peretta, Milano; copyright © 1997-2006 Monica Levy, Roberto Peretta, Milano. All rights reserved
  .:. last updated on February 2, 2012