For more than a millennium, Venice could be reached only by boat. That changed in January 1846, when Austrian engineers completed a masonry causeway of 222 arches across the lagoon, 3,601 metres long, joining the island city to the mainland at Mestre. Milan to Venice Day Trip by Train Tickets have been sold for that crossing ever since, first behind steam, now behind Frecciarossa sets rated for 300 kilometres an hour. The line runs flat through the Po Valley, past Brescia, Verona, Vicenza and Padua, before the horizon dissolves into open water. Milano Centrale sets the tone at the departure end. Ulisse Stacchini won the design competition in 1912; construction stalled through the First World War, and the station opened only in 1931, by which time its scale had been inflated to suit the regime that inherited it. Twenty-four platforms sit beneath steel-and-glass vaults rising some 72 metres. Stone eagles, winged horses and Assyrian-looking reliefs crowd a facade nearly 200 metres wide. Passengers cross a marble concourse the length of a city block before the tracks come into view. The arrival end answers in a different century. Venezia Santa Lucia stands on ground cleared in 1861, when the church of Santa Lucia was demolished to make room for a terminus. Angiolo Mazzoni's rationalist replacement, finished in 1954, is deliberately low: a horizontal band of Istrian stone that leaves the skyline to the Scalzi church opposite. Its steps end at the Grand Canal, and vaporetto pontoons begin where the platforms stop, which is why a Venice day tour from Milan feels less like an arrival than a transfer. Beyond lies a city of 118 islands, some 400 bridges and 150 canals. San Marco was consecrated in 1094, its five domes and roughly 8,000 square metres of gold mosaic modelled on Constantinople rather than Rome. Antonio da Ponte's single stone arch at Rialto, completed in 1591, replaced a wooden span that had already collapsed twice. The Doge's Palace carries its weight upside down, heavy wall resting above pierced loggia. La gita in giornata da Milano a Venezia in treno compresses eleven centuries of that into a single stretch of daylight; Milan to Venice Day Trip by Train Tours only give the compression a timetable.