Italy

Shortest is 6 hours. Learn to use the www.deutschebahn.com website. Easy to use, available in English, and they have 99 % of all the European train timetables programmed in their system. Its a RS favorite.

You can go to www.raileurope.com and check out travel times (and Rail Europe's prices as a data point). This way you'll get a pretty good idea of how long it will take, ball park idea of how many/few high speed trains and their extra cost etc. Really scroll down and select several trains avoiding tight connection times. Your train might pull in to the platform next to your next train but, well, ha ha ha. Really enjoy train travel myself. FYI the local trains in Italy may go on strike depending on who knows what but the high speed trains usually (operative word here) will not.

Beware of using raileurope.com. They only list trains they sell tickets for, and they sell tickets at a markup compared with the national rail sites. For schedules, use The German Rail site. For prices, use the site of the national rail company where your journey starts ( http://www.tgv-europe.com for France, http://www.trenitalia.com for Italy, http://www.rail.ch for Switzerland, etc). If the starting country's website doesn't help, try the ending country's website. Many rail routes now follow an airline style pricing model. They offer cheap tickets if you buy in advance and lock yourself into a specific train, and the price goes up (sometimes WAY up) if you wait until the last minute and/or need flexibility. Sometimes to get the cheapest price on a route, you have to buy it as two separate tickets (for instance, Interlaken to Domodossola on Swiss Rail, then Domodossola to Venice on Trenitalia). For your particular route, I'm not saying this is cheapest or best - do some checking, or ask some of the people here who are more knowledgeable.

It is a nice train ride and it will take about 6 hours. The best train ride is the Swiss area where you will enjoy the Alps scenary Viviana Rome , Italy

RailEurope is not a good source for any rail information since they are a travel agency and not a rail company.

This thread is from last summer.