Italy trains

There's little difference between them, so choose whichever combination of time and price best fits your trip. Trenitalia has general info about their newest category of trains at https://www.trenitalia.com/en/frecce/frecciarossa_1000.html. You can also see these photos from an independent source: https://www.seat61.com/frecciarossa.htm.

Thank you Laura very much. The pictures you sent were totally different than the ones on ItaliaRail. We will book soon.
Ruth

I've been looking at rail travel for Italy, as well. You might want to do some reading on Seat61. He does off some good tips for purchasing Italian tickets. He also offers a link to the new Italian site which off the top of my head is the Italiarail. Apparently there is a booking charge thru Italiarail, BUT, if you use the Seat61 link, the fees will be removed. In my research there seems to be local trains, regional trains, interregional trains, and only on the longer trips does it make sense to prepurchase tickets. When I've purchased rail tickets in advance, I usually try to use the country specific site. When that doesn't work due to language barriers or other reasons, I use loco2. Loco2 does not charge fees. Some people use Trainline which does charge small fees. The one to really try to avoid would be RailEurope.

Use trenitalia.com , they're the ones actually handling the trains. There's also italotreno, a new ish high speed train private company. Italiarail, on the other hand, is an agency that doesn't own or handles trains .

We've (wife and I) used Loco2.com for train travel all over Europe. Love it. Extremely easy to use.
They are linked into the Trenitalia reservation system.

Ruth,

Are you planning on just making rail trips between Venice, Florence and Rome, or will you be making shorter day trips as well? It makes sense to buy tickets for the high speed trains in advance, as you can save some money with that approach. However you must be willing to commit to a specific departure as the tickets are specific to train, date and departure time and can only be used on the one train listed on the ticket.

If you're going to be making any trips on Regionale trains, it's just as easy to buy the tickets locally at the stations. There are no discounts with advance purchase Regionale tickets. With locally purchased tickets, DON'T forget to validate these prior to boarding the train on the day of travel, or you'll risk hefty fines which will be collected on the spot!

As mentioned earlier, for travel on high speed trains you can use either Trenitalia (Freccia) or Italo Treno. Use whichever one has the best prices at the time, and fits your schedule best.

For ticket purchases, you can use.....

• Trenitalia (rail operator)
• Italo Treno (rail operator)
• Trainline.com (they do charge a small fee in some cases, but it's not a large fee - they also have a smartphone app so possible to book tickets on the fly)
• Loco2
• Italia Rail

There may be others as well.

Thanks spbriggs and Ken for the info but we already booked our train tickets back in June through Trenitalia. Appreciate the reply.

Ruth