Travelling through italy. please help?

Question

Hi,

my partner and i are travelling from nice to venice to pisa, florence, rome, naples and sicily. what is the best to do on travelling to save us money. we are both under 26 so not sure if we should buy a rail pass or point to point.. I dont really understand the rail pass with the days in months. We will be going for 2 weeks.

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

You're close to where the pass has a cost advantage, but not quite there. Without a compelling cost advantage, I would go with the point-to-point tickets.

Cost for point-to-point (per person): http://www.ferroviedellostato.it/ferrovi...

Nice - Venice: 52 euro 2nd class Euro City change in Milan

Venice - Pisa: 37.70 euro Eurostar & regional change in Florence

Pisa - Florence: 6.30 euro regional train

Florence - Rome 36.10 Eurostar or 28.90 with Amica discount fare, if available

Rome - Naples: 27.60 Eurostar or 22.10 with Amica discount fare, if available

Naples - Palermo: 47.50 Intercity Plus or 38.40 with Amica discount fare, if available

Total 207.20 euro  for standard fare or 185.40 euro for high speed trains if you can get the Amica fare.

note: Amica is a discounted fare on higher speed trains - there are a limited number of seats at this price on any given train.

Depending on where you're from, you can get either a Eurail pass or an Interrail pass. If you want to do the whole trip with a pass, you would need a 6 days in 2 months ticket to make all the trips you're proposing to do. That would be 230 euro per person since you're under 26 years old. 6 days in two months just means you can travel on any six days in a two month period from the first use. Since only one of the trains is in France, you should consider buying an individual ticket from Nice to Ventimiglia, Genoa, or Milan and buying a one country pass for Italy. You'll still need 6 days of travel, but the Italy pass would cost 161 euro per person at your ages. Ventimiglia is the 1st stop in Italy on the line from Nice.

The issue here will be that almost all of the above trains will require you to pay a supplement on top of the cost of the pass. http://www.eurail.com/1_reservations_sup... http://www.eurail.com/1_train_reservatio... Basically, this will be the seat reservation fee which is usually a few euro and a fee for the train type - overall, this could amount to 5 to 20 euro per train as shown in the provided links. In the example above, the total supplement would come out to be 65 euro, putting your cost with the pass at 226 euro.

The "free" trains with the passes are the slower regional trains. Your proposed trips with a pass will be about 20 euro more than the standard fare, and point-to-point tickets are even cheaper if you can get the Amica fares.

Even using all regional trains will also save money point-to-point. Although you don't have to pay a supplement with the pass, the point-to-point tickets are somewhat cheaper too. For example, a ticket from Florence to Rome is only 15.80 euro, but you'll have an additional 90 minutes travel time. Venice to Pisa costs 19.60 euro, but you'll have to change trains in Bologna & Florence, the travel time goes up quite a bit, and there are few options on the leg Bologna to Florence. There are similar reductions from Nice to Venice and Naples to Palermo.

You can do a similar comparison for Interrail tickets if you're an EU resident.

Answer 2

Just buy train tickets when you need them. Trains are fairly cheap in Italy. If you want to travel cheap bring a tent and stay in campsites wherever you feel like stopping for the night.

Answer 3

When we went last October we just bought the train passes as we needed them, mostly just hopping on TrenItalia or Eurostar for the longer rides.  It was a little confusing at first but after some time we got the hang of it.  If you have a Rick Steves guide handy there was a page that was a  lifesaver for us, it was a snapshot of a train ticket and how to read it.  At the very least make a xerox copy at your local library so you can learn to understand/read the train tickets.