About this journey

Venice Mestre station, classified by Rete Ferroviaria Italiana as a gold category station, serves as one of north-east Italy's busiest junctions, where five named lines — the Milan–Venice, Venice–Udine, Trento–Venice, Venice–Trieste, and Adria–Mestre — converge. Around 500 trains and 85,000 passengers pass through each day, and a four-track main line connects the station westward toward the lagoon crossing at Venezia Santa Lucia via the Ponte della Libertà. The network here has been reshaped in recent decades: a section of the Linea dei Bivi, closed since 1993, was reborn over the new curved Maerne viaduct and opened officially on 30 May 2008, entering passenger service on 10 June 2008.

The journey ends at Bologna Centrale, a station marked permanently by the events of 2 August 1980, when a terrorist bombing killed 85 people and wounded over 200, destroying most of the main station building. As a memorial, the station clock was fixed at 10:25 — the moment of the explosion — in 1996, and inside the building the original floor tile pierced by the detonation and a glass-covered crack in the reconstructed main wall remain visible today. Mestre's modernising infrastructure and Bologna's carefully preserved wounds make this a route that carries the weight of Italian railway history at both ends.