A Tour by Train of 5 Dazzling European Cities

A century after the original golden era of railroads, trains are once again the talk of travel. In Europe, especially, train travel is surging as an environmental alternative to short-haul flights, with more night trains, high-speed routes and transnational collaboration between rail companies. Political ties between European countries may be jittery, but the cities are more linked than ever.

Trains also return us to the romance of travel. The pacifying hours invite reading and contemplation as the landscapes reveal the geography between destinations — the Zen opposite of air travel’s frittered tedium.

I travel to Sweden annually from my home in Florence, Italy. Seeking the contemporary culture of other cities and to cut down on flying, I devised a train odyssey from the Mediterranean south to the Scandinavian north. Could a trip with so many providers and legs actually work? Using a hodgepodge of rail sites, I booked a two-week itinerary of high-speed trains from Milan to Stockholm, with stopovers in Zurich, Berlin and Copenhagen: five cities in five countries.

A word of advice: Book a month or two in advance to get the best prices; check if a Eurail or Interrail pass might benefit you; and pack meals — the food service on these routes is spotty and, when available, terrifyingly industrial.

With tips from local friends rather than sightseeing checklists, I was ready to cross the continent.

Milan

Milan has recast itself as a vibrant city, full of high-polish people making things happen. An international flight hub, it’s a convenient starting point for travelers arriving from abroad.

My first stop was the Prada Foundation, whose contemporary exhibitions give the city a measure of cool and cultural relevance. Heading to Corso Venezia, I promenaded through the park and surrounding streets filled with wild experiments in 20th-century architecture, then visited the Luigi Rovati Foundation, with its Etruscan antiquities and contemporary art in a 19th-century palazzo made modern by the architect Mario Cucinella.

In the evening, a friend joined me in NoLo — the long-hyped neighborhood north of Piazzale Loreto. After an aperitivo at La Botte Fatale, a wine bar hosting occasional small concerts and exhibits, we reached the thrumming Piazza Morbegno, where we dined at Silvano, which has been packed ever since opening last year. “My dream was of a place with happy clients, not a Michelin star,” the chef Vladimiro Poma said of his “gastronomy for all,” with sharing plates like stewed peppers with peanuts and cilantro.

While I crashed at a friend’s, travelers might try the new Casa Brivio hotel (from 300 euros, or about $315), in a pair of residential buildings with midcentury-inspired suites by the architect Matteo Thun.

Departing from Centrale station, with its Art Deco and Rationalist architecture, its soaring halls and Roman-style mosaics, its Fascist-era megalomaniac scale and indiscriminately plastered ads and LED screens, always seizes me with both awe and anger. I boarded the line to Zurich.

On a spotless Swiss train (3.5 hours; tickets from 34 Swiss francs, or about $38), I watched the soft slopes of Italy give way to Switzerland’s craggy cliff faces. Waterfalls burst from the rocks, with snow-capped Alpine peaks wreathed in clouds towering over valleys of wildflower meadows and black-and-white cows — a fantasy landscape.

A short walk from the station, I dropped my luggage at Locke am Platz (from 150 francs), which opened last year with apartment-style rooms inspired by Swiss design.

Over a couple of days, I roamed from Nude, a riverfront cafe in Tanzhaus’s Brutalist headquarters; to the Löwenbräukunst art center, a beer factory converted into art spaces; to Josefwiese park with its pétanque crowds and Alpine chalet bar.

From the Bürkliplatz flea market, I meandered into the galleries along Rämistrasse before reaching the Kunsthaus — Switzerland’s largest museum since doubling its spaces in 2020 with David Chipperfield’s graceful concrete-block monolith. Inside, the Impressionist paintings of the permanent collection were hung amid viewer surveys, with questions like: How to treat these works donated by a Nazi arms dealer?

Zurich is built on the shores of a swimmable lake, and its picture-book streets are backdropped by saw-toothed mountains — an idyllic union of nature and an immaculate city. However, there’s a vibe shift at Rote Fabrik, a factory that has become a scruffy center for alternative culture, where a new generation is packing the calendar with concerts, parties and drag shows. In its graffiti-encrusted courtyard, D.J.s blasted house music at a day rave I attended, while a packed “Queer Tango” class proceeded inside. For all of Zurich’s predictable orderliness, there’s also a thriving and unruly flip side.

Across the lake, the Le Corbusier pavilion, a radical 1967 home-turned-museum, stood like a giant stack of rainbow toy blocks. Hopping on the ferry to the center, I stopped by Heisswein, an unpretentious natural wine bar serving small plates and its own pickled vegetables. Back at my hotel, I sat on the balcony and marveled at the city’s contentedness.

Berlin

The Deutsche Bahn train I boarded was bedraggled (from 70 euros), but the trip’s scenery made up for it with cornfields and vineyard hills, shifting to flatlands before a shock of skyscrapers in Frankfurt. We stalled for an hour outside Berlin, and as my journey’s longest leg stretched to over nine hours, I broke my cardinal rule of avoiding train refreshments with a red wine tasting of artificial oak and desperation.

A 15-minute subway ride from the station, the Hoxton hotel (from 100 euros), opened last summer, hoping to become a hot spot in strait-laced Charlottenburg. The accommodation’s pastel charms seemed to be working — I spied the musician Devendra Banhart at breakfast.

I biked around pretty Prenzlauer Berg with a friend who recalled the neighborhood when, until its recent yoga and ceramic studio years, it was full of war-pocked, coal-heated squats. I watched the evening come alive in Neukölln from a window seat at the new wine bar Sway, and found food love at Sathutu, an imaginative Berlin take on Sri Lankan flavors.

Berlin is a muscular city, with epic postwar boulevards and pharaonic East-versus-West architecture. At Kulturforum, a monumental 1950s plaza, I meandered from one museum to the next — Mies van der Rohe’s Neue Nationalgalerie building, the Gemäldegalerie of great masters, the airy Museum of Musical Instruments with its house-size old cinema organ and Saturday performances.

Against Berlin’s staggering scale, the city’s tree-lined river and canals provided relief for groups of locals: goth punks, regular punks, barefoot neo-hippies and eccentrics — a citizenry nonchalantly indulging in weed but also hard drugs and one plein-air sex act I cannot unsee.

Even with rents rising, the libertine spirit seemed irradicable.

Copenhagen

From Berlin, the nearly eight-hour journey (60 euros) took me through German cookie-cutter towns of A-frame houses, but when I awoke from a nap in the train’s oversize armchair, the view had changed to undulating fields of sheared golden wheat bordered by wildflowers: I’d arrived in Denmark.

In Copenhagen, the rain came down in hard slants, yet bike lanes were busy as cyclists in popsicle-colored parkas cruised by, children poking out of Christiania cargo boxes. The well-preserved city, with centuries-old apartment buildings of brick or bright paint, was squeaky clean — so apparently wholesome and well-functioning that I might have been the only jaywalker in town.

I headed to Cisternerne, an underground water reservoir transformed, with its open pools, into an unusual art space. In near-total darkness, I crossed a gangway over the cistern’s water, enveloped by a dirge-like sound piece by Taryn Simon. Emerging to parting rain clouds, I biked, stopping by the Rosenborg Castle gardens, then the Nørrebro neighborhood of vintage shops and local favorites like the wine bar Pompette. There were bike lanes on even the tiniest streets.

The following day was the inauguration of Riviera, the third cafe from the talented baker Chiara Barla, whose recipes span Denmark and her native Italy. In the corner eatery furnished with spare designs by Copenhagen’s own Frama, I devoured buttered sourdough bread and apricot ricotta cake. “People are faring well in Copenhagen,” Ms. Barla said, beaming.

Taking the dazzlingly fast subway to Amager island, I left the center for an aperitivo at Josephine, a circus-colored wine bar, before retreating to the brand-new Hotel Bella Grande, where I’d dropped my luggage earlier — more Italian inspiration, with damask couches and space-age lamps, yet somehow still sharp and modern and uniquely Copenhagen.

Stockholm

Leaving Copenhagen’s castle-like station, the train (5.3 hours, from 35 euros) traversed the five-mile bridge connecting Denmark and Sweden, which opened in 2000 as a symbol of shared European Union optimism. Birds alighting from the marshes followed the train over the border, formed by the waters of the Oresund strait.

From the windows of the tattered but mercifully silent train car, I watched the passing show: Falu red farmhouses, pastures of cows and horses, shimmering swaths of lakes. I spotted rabbits and deer among the slender birches and spruce pines before the train glided over the mouth of the Baltic Sea to the islands that form Stockholm.

I walked to Östermalm for a cinnamon morning bun at Stora Bageriet inside the 17th-century industrial building that houses the Swedish Museum of Performing Arts. At nearby Nybroviken, a bay where boats depart for the archipelago, I opted for the ferry to Djurgården, an island of museums and woods that were once royal hunting grounds, to visit the contemporary art exhibitions and raw concrete new halls of Liljevalchs, then strolled the bridges to Moderna Museet’s stellar collection of 20th-century art on neighboring Skeppsholmen.

One evening I stopped into Brutalisten, where I found the artist and owner, Carsten Höller, dining at a window table, and sampled a multi-mushroom concoction. Another night, friends and I nestled in the corner of Främmat, a French-inspired natural wine restaurant in a dim, cozy cellar in Vasastan. “In Stockholm, we’re obsessed with figuring out what’s next and what’s cool,” said one of my tablemates.

I wanted to stay in Södermalm, the Stockholm island of eclectic bars, young creatives and squads of paternity-leave dads with their offspring in BabyBjörns, so I found a room at Hotel Frantz (from 140 euros), an antique inn turned design guesthouse, originally built by a tailor in 1647.

Just across the street, I took an elevator to the refurbished Gondolen, a 1935 cocktail lounge cantilevered 11 stories over Södermalm’s waterfront, with views of Stockholm’s harbors and Swedish Grace architecture. Intending to check out several spots, I met friends at the low-key Bar Ninja, but never left — the wine, music and easygoing atmosphere settled us in until closing time.

My journey ended with a 5 a.m. departure from Arlanda Airport: I’d given in to the conveniences and hermetically sealed discomforts of budget air travel to head home to Italy. Yet even in my flight-mode zombie state, I was dreaming about my mostly seamless train odyssey, about the landscapes I’d seen and the illuminating cities I’d briefly been a part of.