Rail transport in Italy high-speed train was the Italian ETR 200, which in July 1939 went from Milan to Florence at , with a top speed of . With this service, the railway was able to compete with the upcoming airplanes. The Second World War stopped these services. After the Second World War, Italy started to repair the damaged railways, and built nearly of new tracks. Nowadays the rail tracks and infrastructure are managed by Rete Ferroviaria Italiana (RFI), while the train and the passenger section is managed mostly by Trenitalia. Both are Ferrovie dello Stato (FS) subsidiaries, once the only train operator in
The World Is What It Is The World Is What It Is The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul is a biography of the Nobel Prize-winning author V. S. Naipaul by Patrick French. It was published in 2008 (by Picador in the UK and Knopf in the USA). The title is a quotation from Naipaul's book "A Bend in the River". "The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it." French deals with Naipaul's family background and his life from his birth in 1932 until his second marriage