The Famous Orient Express Train Is Back in Italy—Here’s What It’s Like on Board

The bathe was pink marble, moodily lit. How lengthy I spent there, scrubbing away airplane grime and jet lag with a bar of Guerlain cleaning soap, I don’t know. By the point I’d arrived in Rome and checked in to my suite at the Orient Specific La Minerva, the magnificent flagship of the model’s new resort portfolio, time had melted like a Dalí clock.

It often takes about 9 hours to fly from Washington, D.C., to Rome. On this journey final spring, it had taken me 32, because of an ideal storm of upkeep issues, crew time-outs, and precise storms. Round two within the morning, a sympathetic pilot (our second of the night) had lastly leveled with us over the loudspeaker: “I don’t know what they’re going to let you know on the gate, however there isn’t any manner this aircraft goes to Rome tonight.”

When all the things goes in response to schedule, flying is bearable, even nice—if you happen to’re in the proper seat. However the previous 12 months has underscored what a brief street it’s from bearable, even nice, to finish nightmare. Is it in any respect shocking that dignified, low-stress practice journey is having such a revival?

I’d come to Italy to expertise La Dolce Vita Orient Specific, the primary of three trains underneath the fabled and just lately revived Orient Specific model. By 2027, its luxurious carriages will crisscross Europe, however Italy was chosen as the placement for its relaunch. La Dolce Vita and the Minerva, which occupies the erstwhile palazzo of Seventeenth-century aristocrats, debuted final April.

My bathe was midway resurrecting. A frothy cappuccino on the sun-warmed terrace of La Minerva’s rooftop restaurant, Gigi Rigolatto, did the remainder. Seven tales above town, it smelled like citrus and jasmine, the perfume carried on a breeze that raced over the terra-cotta roofs and rustled the tassels on the solar umbrellas. I ordered one other espresso. I ordered spaghetti alle vongole. The fury of attending to Rome light into the glory of being in Rome.

I needed I had extra time, however my journey on La Dolce Vita was departing that night time: a loop from the Everlasting Metropolis to Puglia after which Abruzzo, the area from which my paternal grandfather’s dad and mom emigrated within the early 1900s. Getting between these areas usually takes about 12 hours; La Dolce Vita stretches the journey into two days and two overnights of tuxedoed singers, Campari cocktails, breakfasts in mattress, and gorgeous landscapes rolling by your cabin window. The brand new platinum period of practice journey is sluggish, however in contrast to air journey, it’s that manner on objective.

Cease One: Rome

Ostiense Station broadcasts itself with a large bas-relief of Pegasus and his handler, the Greek demigod Bellerophon. The all-black Mercedes from La Minerva moved as swiftly because the winged horse, delivering me to the far finish of the late-Thirties landmark. The place as soon as there was a grocery store there may be now La Dolce Vita’s swanky departure lounge, guarded by potted birds-of-paradise and staffers in navy fits with tangerine lapels.

Inside minutes, the workers had me checked in and mingling with my 39 fellow passengers. Transferring all through the suited and sequined group was Paolo Barletta, the charismatic 39-year-old founder and CEO of the Arsenale Group, the Italian luxurious agency behind La Dolce Vita. “Over the following 50 years, this would be the third leg of tourism,” he stated after discovering me on a settee, the place I used to be chasing olives with an Americano cocktail. “You’ve got resorts, you will have cruises, and now you will have practice cruises.”

Barletta calls La Dolce Vita and its future siblings “practice cruises” as a result of they cease “in port,” simply as a cruise ship would. Passengers exit for the day and return in time for pre-dinner drinks. Below Barletta’s path, Arsenale began creating the idea 5 years in the past, custom-manufacturing the carriages for La Dolce Vita with the Milanese design agency Dimorestudio. To assist handle the mission, he chosen Accor, which owns the Orient Specific model. “They’d this unbelievable asset that deserved to be reborn,” he stated.

Certainly, Orient Specific is maybe probably the most mythic identify within the journey world. From 1883 to 1977, opulent trains operated underneath this banner all through Europe, the Center East, and Asia, inspiring Agatha Christie’s titular 1934 thriller, together with legions of bucket-list-keepers for whom the trains symbolize the ne plus extremely of glamorous, old-school journey. Accor acquired the model in 2022 and partnered with LVMH, which runs its personal luxurious trains by means of Belmond, together with the Venice Simplon-Orient-Specific. That the 2 firms use the Orient Specific identify is a supply of confusion Barletta has aimed to untangle by means of his practice cruising mannequin. (Aboard the VSOE, which I traveled on in 2023, passengers sometimes stay on the practice for all the journey.) I’ll admit, I used to be nonetheless slightly fuzzy on the idea. “You’ll see tomorrow in Matera,” Barletta smiled, his blue eyes crinkling on the corners, earlier than dashing off. 

After an hour within the lounge, the workers started escorting us to the practice. A cabin steward led me alongside the wood-grain-detailed, sapphire-painted carriages and into my suite. Earlier than I knew it, La Dolce Vita had left the station, and I needed to get to dinner. The eating automotive was all white cloths and branded china and Gio Ponti–impressed salt-and-pepper shakers which have a behavior, I used to be knowledgeable, of mysteriously going lacking. (Higher than homicide, I suppose.) ’Nduja-crusted lobster adopted scorpion-fish spaghetti, with the glints of spice reflecting the delicacies of the Mezzogiorno, the southern half of Italy to which the practice was heading.

Someplace close to the Gulf of Gaeta, my fellow passengers and I adjourned to the lounge automotive, which the proficient Coky Ricciolino full of athletic renditions of songs like “Mambo Italiano” and “Tu Vuò Fà L’Americano.” “Fly me to the moon,” he crooned, “Let me play among the many stars.” All dressed up and slightly wobbly from the wine and the locomotion, it felt like I used to be already there.

Cease Two: Matera

Puglia, the heel of Italy’s boot, kicked me awake.

I used to be wrapped like a caterpillar in white sheets by Rivolta Carmignani, the identical model used on the unique Orient Specific traces. My 118-square-foot suite, considered one of 30 en suite lodging aboard, got here slowly into focus. The VSOE owns the Artwork Deco look. LDV, properly, went one other manner. Reverse the double mattress was a love seat and two barrel chairs tucked underneath a eating desk set with contemporary flowers. Daylight seeped in from the perimeters of the 2 massive home windows, revealing particulars in apricot suede, camel leather-based, and vermilion lacquer. In my suite and all through the carriages, reflective surfaces and frisky curves channeled the midcentury aesthetic of the practice’s namesake, Federico Fellini’s 1960 movie La Dolce Vita.

A knock on the door. I threw on a gown to seek out my cabin steward bearing the breakfast I’d ordered the night time earlier than: comfortable cheeses, blush-pink folds of prosciutto cotto, fresh-squeezed orange juice, finely lower fruit, pastries, an ideal cappuccino with a barista-drawn coronary heart, and a second cappuccino as a result of one wasn’t going to be almost sufficient. She organized them on the eating desk, and I pushed open the curtains. The Adriatic Sea flashed between vineyards.

The 40,000-foot views from an airplane by no means fail to encourage, however what you see from a practice is a lot extra intimate. I ate breakfast and watched the surroundings change. Recent mower traces on a soccer discipline. Cactus paddles beaded with younger prickly pears. Tablecloths draped over the balconies of mid-rise flats with sun-bleached peach and coral exteriors.

The practice coasted into Bari, the capital of Puglia, to the exuberant horns and drums of a welcome band. The commuters on the station regarded each confused and delighted, filming on their telephones as we disembarked and the native guides wrangled their teams for the day’s experiences. My small group hopped in a black SUV and headed out of town. It had rained all of the earlier week, leaving the countryside neon inexperienced. As we crossed the border into Basilicata, we stopped at Casal Dragone, a family-owned vineyard and agriturismo now in the arms of a 3rd era, to go to what Angela Dragone calls “the Sistine Chapel of southern Italy.”

We made our manner a mile from Dragone’s farmhouse, alongside a dusty street above the Gravina River, which cuts a deep ravine by means of fields of wheat and lavender. We then adopted a staircase carved into the limestone to a cavelike opening. Inside, early-medieval frescoes coated the partitions. Royal blue, oxblood, and gold paint illuminated the creation of Adam and the temptation of Eve—the couple who give the place its identify, the Crypt of the Unique Sin—together with varied apostles and archangels. Mary, in queenlike robes, gathered child Jesus in her arms. The chapel, a voice-over recording defined, was possible based by monks within the early ninth century earlier than the Arab conquest in 859 AD, and was utilized by shepherds to shelter their flocks till it was rediscovered in 1963. The artist is unknown however has been colloquially named the Flower Painter of Matera for the pink poppy-like blooms threaded by means of the frescoes.

The identical flowers rouged the perimeters of the street, the place the resident Labrador mixes, Lulu and Mocio, led us again to the agriturismo’s bodega. There, Dragone uncorked a bottle of the property’s refreshing Malvasia Greco di Basilicata and crammed my glass. She teared up whereas speaking about her father, who donated the crypt to a nonprofit basis so others might share its treasures. “That is very emotional for me,” she stated, then, in typical Italian-mom fashion, smothered the desk with meats and cheeses.

From Dragone we drove quarter-hour into Matera for a guided stroll by means of town’s jumble of limestone sassi, the rudimentary cave dwellings my information stated had been thought of “the embarrassment of Italy” when the federal government evicted all of the residents within the Nineteen Fifties. Now this stone honeycomb is sizzling actual property. Whereas some sassi have been preserved as museums, others are actually inhabited by gelaterias, pottery outlets, boutique resorts, and eating places like Vitantonio Lombardo, the place the Orient Specific passengers convened for an extended lunch. The oven-crisped zitoni pasta filled with braised-forever ragù felt like a long-lost relative of my grandmother’s Sunday gravy.

We didn’t get again on the practice till an hour or so earlier than dinner—simply in time for a flute of Franciacorta within the lounge. The wine fizzed over the rim; I fizzed over the artwork and hospitality at Casal Dragone. There, within the cool, stone-walled tasting room, La Dolce Vita had curated a real second of discovery and connection, one thing that, within the Italy of The White Lotus and billionaire Venetian weddings, is tougher and tougher to do.

Cease Three: Abruzzo

Regardless of being solely 110 miles east of Rome, the excessive plateaus, forests, and mountains of Abruzzo give the area a wild, distant taste. Not a spot you need to be deserted in a blizzard, and positively not in 1987, as Marcello D’Amico was on his first day engaged on the Italian “little Trans-Siberian,” the Sulmona-Carpinone practice route nicknamed by a journalist in 1980 for the remoted, at occasions snowy wilderness it traverses.

“It was Christmas Eve,” he recounted, pausing for dramatic impact, “and the snow got here out of nowhere.” He’d hunkered down in a trackside shack close to the Campo di Giove station with a cot, a tenting range, and no approach to get in contact along with his household. No one got here to get him till December 26.

In its heyday, the Sulmona-Carpinone was an engineering marvel offering very important connections between far-flung mountain villages, passing by means of Abruzzo’s 180,000-acre Maiella Nationwide Park. However buses had made it out of date by 2011, when the road shut down. D’Amico and his coterie of historic-train lovers revived it as a vacationer attraction in 2014, with D’Amico returning as conductor. The vintage automobiles of polished woodwork and burgundy velvet now carry about 30,000 individuals yearly, together with all of the passengers on my journey. Not like in Bari, the place visitors had tour decisions, everyone obtained off in Sulmona, our second cease, and boarded the “Trans-Siberian.” Our vacation spot for the day journey was Pescocostanzo, a member of Italy’s borghi più belli affiliation of small cities and villages with distinct historic, cultural, and creative heritage.

My ears popped as we climbed 35 ft per mile, scooting by means of slim tunnels and round villages nestled within the valleys of the Maiella mountains. The slopes shed their brilliant emerald foliage as we ascended the switchbacks, revealing bald limestone creases and peaks with snow dripping down the edges, like icing on a Bundt cake. At 4,160 ft above sea degree, the practice got here to a cease at Rivisondoli-Pescocostanzo station, the best on the Italian standard-gauge community after the Brenner Move linking Italy and Austria.

Throughout the Renaissance, a popularity for tremendous craftsmanship enriched Pescocostanzo, and strolling its streets in a small group, I might see it nonetheless had a little bit of Florentine swagger. There’s a hardy, mountain humility to the structure, however the noble households, rich retailers, and artists who rebuilt the village after a 1456 earthquake took a flaunt-it-if-you-got-it method to the main points, like pairing a Cartier watch with Carhartt overalls. Carved-wood dragons watch from palazzo eaves, and an ornate wrought-iron cage encases double bells atop town corridor’s clock tower. A two-tone cobblestoned road connects Pescocostanzo’s civic hub to its non secular middle, the hilltop Basilica of Santa Maria del Colle, the place a round window friends down on the metropolis corridor like a cyclops. Contained in the church, gold-dipped ceiling coffers, chiseled marble, and steel angels and demons create a Baroque fever dream. I might have spent the entire afternoon there, however a parishioner shooed us out for an incoming funeral procession. An getting older inhabitants and declining delivery charge are existential points in Italy, however emigration additional stretches the ratio in rural areas like this. Luckily, D’Amico and his countrymen are delightfully obstinate in sustaining their traditions.

I met Alba Di Geronimo on the Bobbin Lace College & Museum, aged 88 and nonetheless working the prized Pescocostanzo handicraft of merletto a tombolo lace. “It’s a manner of remaining younger,” she stated whereas juggling 10 wood bobbins wound with thread. Her arms had been easy and durable, her fingernails like backyard spades. She created an intricate lace border on an angled tombolo pillow with the easy dexterity of a spider.

“The brand new era doesn’t all the time need to study the traditions,” 58-year-old Carmela Sette, Di Geronimo’s weaving associate, chimed in. “However in Pescocostanzo, they do.” Courses given by the museum’s college make sure the craft’s preservation. 

There was yet another conventional Abruzzese craft to expertise. After a lunch of tender gnocchi in pea purée at La Corniola, a ristorante with rustic terra-cotta flooring and wood sideboards full of delicate glassware, we traveled again to Sulmona on the “Trans-Siberian.” (D’Amico chatted the entire experience, displaying me images of deer and wolves alongside final winter’s snow-packed tracks and telling me in regards to the time he traveled to Rome with a white goat, a present for the late Pope Francis.) Again on La Dolce Vita, I discovered a sq. reward field in my cabin. Inside had been candied almonds and hazelnuts in coatings the colours of raspberries and occasional, basil and lemons. Confetti di Sulmona. These small, multicolored confections, crafted by Abruzzese candymakers because the 14th century, are the place we get the English that means of confetti. As an alternative of throwing them within the air, I threw them into my mouth.

Cease 4: Again to Rome 

On a luxurious practice like La Dolce Vita, the opposite passengers start as characters: Ambassador Tweed, Madame Monumental Diamond. Some identities get revealed over cocktails and chitchat, others by means of Instagram snooping, which was how I realized a former secretary of state of Australia (she of the large diamond) was on board, together with the founding father of luxurious practice competitor Golden Eagle, which, a number of months after my journey, Arsenale introduced it had purchased. Different visitors stay cloaked in thriller, which suited the expertise tremendous.

Over drinks within the bar automotive, representatives of the practice talked about Sarah Hebblethwaite. Would I thoughts if she joined my desk for dinner? She’s touring alone.

Fascinating. Which character, I questioned, had I pegged her as? She was a retired English trainer, I might later study, which most likely defined why she arrived on the desk first. Wise silver haircut. Periwinkle cardigan. I hadn’t seen her in Matera or Abruzzo. I hadn’t seen her on board. In a thriller, she’d have made a superb spy.

The workers served saffron risotto and Abruzzese wine as Hebblethwaite, a trilingual diplomat’s daughter, served her backstory. British by delivery and Parisian by residence, she would flip 81 the next week and had cherished trains for almost as a few years. Rising up, her household would journey from London to their second dwelling in Italy, disembarking in Dover and boarding the ferry for the Channel crossing. “The Orient Specific carriages would already be on the boat,” she remembered. “The thought of truly being on that practice… it was a childhood dream.”

Her husband ought to have been there. A couple of weeks earlier than the journey and their sixtieth anniversary, he died unexpectedly. However his passing didn’t decide whether or not Hebblethwaite, a girl who had waited seven a long time to punch an Orient Specific ticket, would cancel or journey. Her chemo schedule did. “I have a scan on Monday morning, so you understand, again to actuality.” Her tone was wry, however her voice hung there only for a second earlier than discovering its footing. “It’s been beautiful, having the ability to use my three languages, assembly individuals, and seeing a little bit of Italy that I’d by no means seen.”

And that’s the X issue of La Dolce Vita. It’s in regards to the practice, the back-of-your-neck tingle that something—a homicide, an affair, a jewel (or not less than salt-and-pepper-shaker) heist—might transpire on this liminal house the place we would develop into extra thrilling variations of ourselves. Nevertheless it’s equally about Italy. 

“You’ll see in Matera,” Barletta had informed me. And now I did. Hebblethwaite did, too. We completed dessert and stated goodbye as we approached Rome. We had been vacationers of various generations, from completely different continents, who’d come for a practice experience however would disembark with recollections of a extra significant journey by means of Italy. It was a plot twist befitting a Victorian whodunit, one neither of us noticed coming. 

Two-night “Everlasting Stones of Matera” itinerary on La Dolce Vita Orient Specific from $4,850. Doubles at Orient Specific La Minerva Rome from $1,400.

A model of this story first appeared within the March 2026 concern of Journey + Leisure underneath the headline “Wheels of Fortune.”