Great Continental Railway Journeys

Armed with his 1913 railway guide, Michael Portillo travels through Italy from Turin to Venice. Along the way, he recreates a scene from the Michael Caine film The Italian Job on a Fiat test track and takes a trip in a seaplane to investigate the early 20th-century British love affair with Lake Como. In Verona, he visits the house used to attract Edwardian tourists to the alleged setting of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and finds a microcosm of pre-First World War Europe at the Venice Biennale art exhibition