Cheapest and fastest way to travel from Avignon to Lucca Italy

That's a tough one.

By car it's around 8 hours drive, but it will be tough to find a rental company that allows you pickup in France and dropoff in Italy for a reasonable price.

By train you will be more confortable. You should try to use www.raileurope.com and you must probably buy multiple tickets if the system does not allow you to buy all the trip at once. Maybe a good idea to break for the night in Nice or Sanremo.

By air... you have to fly into Pisa airport. I have tried a couple of searches but could not find any options for September.

Thanks Dan.A few more questions. Do you know what the train routing is from Avignon to Lucca? ie what cities we would go through and how long it would take by train?
Also can you fly directly from Avignon to Pisa? And how long does it take? Any idea on cost?
Thanks so much for advice.

Diane, try searching the trip on the Deutsche Bahn site, as they have excellent timetables. Unfortunately, that trip looks to be a very long one with lots of stopovers. When you look up a trip, it will give you basic details. To see all the changes, click the arrow at the very left-hand-side of each route and it will show all the details.

I found one that is ten hours long (so long as you start at the Avignon TGV) and it goes through Nice, Ventimiglia, Genova, and Viareggio.

On the train, you are looking at 12.0hrs-17.5hrs depending on the run. You will change trains up to 5 times.

CLICK HERE to see a sample train schedule. Click on "Details" to see the different train runs and intermediate stops.

For flights, there doesn't appear to be any budget flights from Avignon to anywhere in Italy. However, you can take a one-hour bus/TGV from Avignon to Lyon and pick up an Easyjet flight to Pisa. But, I see that Easyjet does not have a flight available on 9/12. You might be stuck with the train. You can also fly budget airlines from Paris but it's a 3.0hr. bus/train ride to paris to pick up a flight.

Thanks everyone for your feedback. Since I have rented a house in Lucca with 8 friends starting Sept 12 at 5 PM I am very determined to find a way to leave Avignon the morning of Sept 12. So what about getting to Marseille ( I think it is only 1 hr from Avignon-right?) and then fly into Italy since it looks like the train will be way too long and too many transfers. If that is a possible option, what is the closer city to Lucca we could fly into???
Appreciate all the advice.

According to the easyJet site, the Lyon-Pisa route is a new one and will go into effect on 11 July. So I assume that there will be at least one Lyon-Pisa flight offered on 12 September.