travelling around italy

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i am planning on travelling around italy this year and would love to visit bologna, siena, florence, pisa, rome, milan, venice by travelling around by train.

how long do you think i would need to go for to be able to visit all these places?

would it be better to move around or stay in one place and use it as a base?

oh and also genoa and naples.

site and this one might be a good place to start browsing - and just bear in mind that travel in Italy in general can be a bit haphazard sometimes....

the first link didn't work. haphazard .... what you mean like not arriving on time ... i'm used to that with british buses!

the first site - just click on the "go to slow travel home page" and it will take you to the site that you can browse -
Italians like to go on strike for no particular reason and so you may not get a train at all - never mind just a late one!

thanks where in italy have you been?

Reckon it's better to move around rather than use one place as a base - sounds like you want to cover an awful lot of really lovely places - I think you'd be better to travel light and lug your stuff with you on the train so that you can have a night or more in each place rather than feeling like you need to keep going back to your base.

You could cover all of these places in 3 weeks i think but if it were me, i'd want to take longer - is that an option? If not, i reckon you'd be better saving Rome and Naples for another trip.

Am dead jealous by the way, sounds like a lovely way to spend your hols!

i was hoping to go for about 2 months if i can afford it, a month if not. i'm a bit nervous about doing it by myself!!

I agree with bellabelly that you could do this in 3 weeks but 4 or 5 would be better. It depends on how much you want to see/do in each place really. You'd need to travel around, I think, in order to see all those places, though you could use Florence as a base for a while and do day-trips to Pisa and Siena.

I disagree with Coolmama about the transport system in Italy. The trains are extremely efficient and tend to run on time. They also have a really good website, which I will try to find for you and which gives you accurate train times for all stations. Just bear in mind that on the fastest trains you will have to pay a supplement, so it's sometimes better (= cheaper) to take the slightly slower train. Oh, and don't be fooled into getting anything (it's usually buses more than trains) that calls itself 'accelerato'. This tends to mean that it does have an accelerator... but the driver hasn't worked out how to use it yet! Bear in mind too that return tickets are only valid for a very short period (3 days, iirc) so buy singles unless you're coming back the same day. On all public transport you have to stamp your ticket in a machine on the platform (or at the bus-stop, or wherever) to 'validate' it before you get on. I'm not sure if they still do it, but when I was a student in Italy (but we're talking 20 years ago now...) you could buy a 1000-km ticket which was really good value. They'd calculate the number of kilometres you did on each leg of your journey and deduct it from your total of 1000km. It worked really well for me. Would be worth finding out about it.

HTH. Let me know if you need any more advice.

This is the Italian railways' website. However, it only seems to exist in Italian, which may not be all that helpful. I'll keep searching.

Found it in English!

This guy is the of all knowledge when it comes to European rail travel.

fount of all knowledge even!

rosa - that link doesn't work.

We stayed here once when we went to Florence - don't normally do hotel recommendations cos it's such a personal thing BUT when we stayed (and this was a few years ago mind so it might have changed) it was very VERY good value because it could only class itself as a one star hotel (think due to not having en-suite bathrooms). Anyway, is dead central and very beautiful palazzo with frecoes and very friendly/helpful hosts (she's Australian, he's Italian).

Oh bother again

It won't do it. But if you click on the link in the error message you get to the right page. How very very strange.