La Dolce Vita Orient Express: 24 hours on board Italy’s new luxury train

Story by Antonia Mortensen, video by Alessandro Gentile, Channon Hodge

Tuscany, Italy (CNN) — Italy has an expensive new transport experience, and it’s not a Ferrari. The Dolce Vita Orient Express — unveiled earlier this year — is the country’s first homegrown luxury train, pitched as an homage to the 1950s and ‘60s, when glamor meant Fellini, Valentino and sunglasses after dark.

There are 18 itineraries on offer, each threading its way through the Italian countryside with an air of cinematic nostalgia. We hitched a ride with the “Taste of Tuscan Vineyards” tour this summer: a 24-hour fever dream of wood panelling, wine and being waited on.

It all begins at Rome’s Ostiense station, in an opulent lounge designed by French architect Hugo Toro. There are original 20th-century mosaics underfoot, live jazz in the air, and servers handing out refreshments before anyone even boards. Luggage is whisked away to cabins.

It’s already a million miles away from the noise and chaos of the rush-hour commute outside.

The cabins

On platform No. 8, the train is waiting. Its vintage Z1 Italian carriages from the ‘70s and ‘80s have been gutted and reimagined with retro-cocktail-lounge-chic by Milan-based interior designers Dimorestudio.

There are 30 cabins: 18 suites and 12 deluxe rooms, each with their own bathroom. My suite — a tidy 118 square feet — manages a double bed, sofa, table and two armchairs and the kind of bathroom where a Dyson hairdryer counts as standard issue.

The deluxe cabins are slightly smaller, but ingenious, with sofabeds and stools that pull double duty as couches and coffee tables.

Our conductor, Raffaela Mattioli, knocks to say hello and reminds us she can be summoned by text message if we need anything — concierge service on rails.

‘The perfect plate’

Lunch is served a few cars down, past black and white photographs of Italy’s fashionable past. Inevitably, the food comes with Michelin credentials: German kitchen genius Heinz Beck designs the menus, while his longtime collaborator Walter Canzio executes them perfectly in what amounts to a closet equipped with saucepans.

“If a food can give you emotion, you make the perfect plate,” Canzio tells us. He isn’t wrong. We try a tuna carpaccio version of pappa al pomodoro, followed by amberjack with zucchini, almonds and saffron. It’s the Italian countryside whizzing past the window, but served neatly on a plate.

Performing culinary magic in a tiny space is “challenging and thrilling at the same time,” Canzio adds.

‘Experience Italy at 360 degrees’

This isn’t just a train, insists Paolo Barletta, the CEO of Italy’s Arsenale Group — one of the consortium of companies behind the Dolce Vita, including French multinational Accor — it’s a way to “experience Italy at 360 degrees.”

Lunch over, there’s refreshments in the Lounge Bar, where staff, who ride with the train for the full 24-hour trip, taking breaks in their own cabins, have less expansive concerns. Chiefly, says Train Manager Dora Domby, the choreography needed to create that luxury hotel experience in a series of boxes on wheels.

It’s not all glamor. Because the Dolce Vita runs on regular Italian tracks, there are occasional pauses for more mundane events like engine swaps, traffic snarlups and delays. At least, thanks to these, guests can tell themselves they’re experiencing “authentic” Italy.

The Tastes of Tuscan Vineyards trip starts at 3,500 euros per person, or around $4,110, for one night and two days on board — that’s as close as it gets to a budget option. Golf-themed itineraries start at 12,360 euros ($14,520), for four days of fairways and fine dining.

Optional add-ons, such as the $500-tour of medieval Montalcino with a Brunello wine tasting, feel almost restrained in comparison.

Dinner calls for guests to slip into something elegant — more elegant. Even the staff switch up already smart uniforms for the evening ahead.

“It’s marvellous,” Christine Arrowsmith, an English guest traveling with husband Colin, says over toots and honks from the resident jazz band. “We like Italian design. There’s something about it, that certain little extra.”

The train has plenty of places to loiter — the lounge, the dining car and the restaurant car — great for mixing with fellow guests or to pretend to read a book while drinking something. There’s certainly more mingling here than in a hotel. It’s like a summer camp, except with better tailoring.

Sleeping in the bedroom is comfortable enough, although the stop-start rhythm of the train was a reminder that such glamor still needs to be hauled by a brute-force locomotive. I woke up a couple of times. Not that it mattered in such pleasant surroundings. The temperature, however, felt a little too cryogenic, perhaps as revenge for the sweltering summer Italy was enduring.

What’s next

The train is the first of six that Arsenale plans to roll out by 2027. More routes — to Istanbul, Split and Paris — are also on the horizon.

Meanwhile, the company has projects in Saudi Arabia — a service called Dream of the Desert — as well as Egypt, Uzbekistan and the UAE.

And because that’s clearly not enough, Arsenale has partnered with Orient Express on the opening of two luxury hotels. La Minerva launched in Rome earlier this year and Palazzo Donà Giovannelli will open in Venice in April 2026.

“Our idea is to expand the fleet and to create a fleet that will be respectful of the heritage and the country where the train will go,” says Barletta. “We hope that, like in the cruising industry, we will have in the next 50 years many trains around the world that people can use to really create this combination between hotels, trains, ships, and so on.”

For now, though, the Dolce Vita, is an opulent rolling stage set, carrying its passengers from one classic Italian postcard to the next.

In the morning, breakfast is served and suddenly it’s over. Before heading our separate ways, we’re shepherded once more into the lounge, where it all began, for one last civilized refreshment to cushion the landing as we head back to reality.

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