Hill Town travel in Tuscany or Umbria

Most posters here find it easy enough to drive, but when I travel solo I use public transportation. The smaller the town the fewer options you will have. Basing somewhere like Siena or Perugia might be your best location choice. Also, some buses can run at inconvenient times, making a roundtrip in one day impossible.

You might check out Rome2rio.com once you have a few choices for cities and compare modes of transportation, travel times and distances, and use the links to train and bus schedules.

Umbria's capital is Perugia. It's also the transport hub of the region and ideal for day trips in Umbria. It's not a small town however, it's a city of 200,000.
For Tuscany, Florence is the capital and transport hub. You can reach any town with public transport from there. It's a big city. Siena is another option. It's also a city, but smaller. It's well connected by bus to the towns and villages within the province of Siena.

Buses in Tuscany are designed for school kids and workers and so the schedules may or may not fit your wishes; trains don't go to hill towns for the most part because hill towns are on hills. I would base in Siena for Tuscany or in Florence and then perhaps plan to take locally available bus tours for the region. Florence in particular is well connected to other towns and is a good base although comparatively expensive. You can take a train to Pisa or Luca or Siena or Arrezo from there. And there are tours to San Gimignano and similar spots. A car is best, but you can get a good taste with careful planning by public transport.

If you use Siena as a base this is the website for the local buses and Extra-Urban Buses into tuscany. http://www.sienamobilita.it/en/orari.html

They had a good map here that will show you the bus # or train to take to each of the towns. I used this on my trip to tuscany this past summer.
http://www.sienamobilita.it/mappe/Mappa_EXT.pdf

You can use this for the timetables.It has all the Bus numbers and the stops. As another poster put above about buses geared towards workers and schools you will notice that on the schedule with the times and some are infrequent. I can't find where i put the symbol guide for for schedule as to which symbol means which day for the frequency
http://www.trainspa.it/train04/extraurbano.pdf

Here is a blog to get you started: http://www.walksofitaly.com/blog/umbria/how-to-get-around-umbria-italywith-public-transport and a lot of the smaller towns are discussed in http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Gazetteer/Places/Europe/Italy/Umbria/_General/accessibility.html

We have stayed in Perugia and traveled by train. That was a few years ago when they had a regular bus down from the town to the train station at the base, now I think they have a gondola. Other people have recommended cities, I'd recommend staying in a hilltown to get the real flavor of the area. To visit hilltowns (or stay in one) you need to do some planning in advance. There is a very helpful TI office in Perugia that can help you with bus times and it is a regional bus depot, although we found buses kinda difficult to figure out since they really are meant for the locals going to work, doing shopping, etc. (unlike trains that run on easier-to-understand schedules).

If you do stay in a smaller town (or visit them) understand there may be a few more challenges. The ticket machines in the stations, to give one example, aren't the easy-to-use models you'll find in bigger cities with English menus. Also travelling by public transit, we found, means planning your destinations before you leave for Italy and plan on visiting maybe 2 towns per day. Build up a sheet of times ("we're in Todi, we can leave at 11:15, 1pm, 2:15pm) and adjust your day as you go

Thank-you everyone for such helpful information! I was really nervous about planning a trip to Italy, but this forum is just wonderful!