Italy Train Route Specific Question---Getting to Santa Margherita

Hi,

This is the Italian train website to check specific routes and times available: https://www.trenitalia.com/

Florence is “Firenze”. If you’re referring to the Santa Margherita near Portofino, it looks like the best option from Florence is having one transfer at Pisa Centrale.

Montepulciano is much more complicated, needing to take four trains to reach Santa Margherita, plus the train station for Montepulciano is out a ways from town, too. When I was there, I took the bus from Montepulciano to a subsequent town to catch the train.

Do you man Santa Margherita Ligure, near Portofino? On the random day I checked I found no direct trains. It appears you must always change trains at least once, most often Pisa but occasionally in La Spezia. Some departures require two changes.

Do not get suckered into buying the departure that starts with a costly Freccia train all the way up to Milan. It is no faster than the other options.

Montepulciano is a more complicated, and slower trip.

You take a look at the details for your specific travel date on the trenitalia website: https://www.trenitalia.com/en.html. For Florence, enter Firenze. For Santa Margerita, enter S.Margherita Ligure.

Remember that when changing trains, you look for the train number on the departure board/monitors to locate the departure platform [binario]. The best restaurant in town is Dal Alfredo [closed Monday]. Look up the ferry schedule to Portofino, where there is excellent hiking.

Trenitalia thinks there's a train station in Montepulciano.

To be precise, Trenitalia calls the station in the valley "Montepulciano Stazione". It is about 10 km from the hill town, Montepulciano.

From Montepulciano, if you want to travel by train anywhere, the best option is to use the CHIUSI-CHIANCIANO train station, located in Chiusi Scalo. It’s the more important train station in the area, so more trains stop there. From there you can take a fairly frequent TIEMME bus to Montepulciano (a 40 min journey). Montepulciano does have a train station north of Chiusi on the same rail line, but few trains stop there and bus service is really scant (or non existent on weekends).

Also when on the Trenitalia website, look under S. Margherita Ligure-Portofino. If you type "Santa Margherita", the train station won;t come up.

Everyone has got you covered on train advice. This post just reminds me of my time when I was 13 or 14 years old visiting Santa Margarita with my dad and some HS students. I was young and didn't speak a lick of Italian yet except for a few basic words so I remember adding an A or an O to the end of words thinking the Italians would somehow now understand me. I was a freshman in HS at the time and I remember I decided to stay behind with some of the older girls in the square by the water. This was 1987. The guys saw us by ourselves and started hitting on us . I remember one guy was playing Stairway to Heaven on his guitar. I think on older guy bought me Ice Cream and I was wearing crappy wet and wild makeup back then. I was young and didn't know any better. Anyways we decided at some point that we should head back to our rooms as the young men were crowding around us especially when you have cute blond American girls in the group. We told them we had to go and started to walk back to the place we were staying in. A group of guys started to follow us back as Italians love to do. We then started to run and when we got back my dad and mom were waiting He sees all these young Italian guts and starts yelling at them in Italian. It was so funny . My mom gave me such the death stare when we got back. Ah memories.