Jean-Baptiste Bonaventure's "Seeing Italy by Train" is enjoying great success in bookstores. The book takes readers on 50 slow rail adventures up and down the Belpaese, complete with maps, itineraries, and practical tips. You can travel between the Alpine glaciers of the Bernina Express (conceived in the early 1900s) and the stone and olive grove landscape between Puglia and Matera with the Ferrovie Appulo Lucane, with the Dante train between Florence and Ravenna, with the Renon train in Trentino Alto Adige (11.8 km in 16 minutes, one of the shortest journeys in Italy) and skirting the water along the Cinque Terre, and of course aboard the Centovalli, launched in the early 1900s between Domodossola in Piedmont and Locarno in Switzerland: 83 bridges and viaducts, 31 tunnels and, as the author writes, “a splendor that fears no comparison.”