In Italy a train is more than just a means of transportation.

Coming up on today's travel with Rick Steve's, author Tim Parks tells us what he's discovered

about the personality of Italy commuting on its uniquely Italian railway.

So there's an awful lot of ambiguity about things that makes really no commercial sense at all.

Tim Parks examines how modern priorities clash with timeless inefficiency and how living in this

paradox can actually be so much fun.

Italians have a way of presenting themselves playing a role that they know

that foreigners are happy with.

And guides from the Amalfi Coast tell us what they see every day, living in a classic fishing

town squeezed under the slopes of the Mediterranean.

The whitewashed house, the tiny streets, the people still wearing the black clothes like in the past.

In Poetano, when you go to visit somebody, you can't walk to visit them them you either have to climb or slide.

All aboard for the Italy Express it's Travel with Rick Steves.

After commuting by train for the better part of 30 years, Tim Parks has started to figure

out the reasons behind how things work and don't work in Italy.

English by birth, Parks married an Italian woman and they've raised their family in Verona.

His latest book follows up on his bestsellers from the 1990s in which he describes getting

acquainted with the everyday frustrations of daily life in Italy.

Parks also writes fiction, and his book Europa was nominated for a Booker Prize in 1997.

He also translates Italian literature into English and teaches at a university in Milan.

His latest book continues his affectionate examination of his adopted homeland and it's called

Italian Ways on and off the rails from Milan to Palermo.

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