Manarola to Venice - possible routes and risks...

We did the Manarola—-Levanto—-Milan route when we stayed in Manarola some years ago. I was happy with that as we do not much like changing trains in Italy, and try to limit those to 1 or 2 per journey. We were on our way to Varenna, not Venice, but we needed to go through Milan and that was fine.

Since that trip we have been back to Italy 5 times, and always seem to pass through MilanomCentrale at some point. That station is large, but we find it easy to manage. Since it is an “end station”, not a “through station” it is easy to transfer between tracks.

Here are a station map, and a “how to” guide from Man in Seat 61.

https://www.g2rail.com/help/stations/milano-centrale

https://www.seat61.com/stations/milan-centrale.htm

If you are going from Manarola to Venice you should book Manarola to Venice, and let the Trenitalia booking system figure out the route for you. There is no need to second guess it. There is no need to split the problem in to subproblems.

So just book Manarola - Venice, with a departure and arrival time that suits your needs. I just wish that Trenitalia managed to offer acceptable connection times in stead of making everyon waste a lot of time at stations...

If you miss a connection you just take the next train...

I believe the OP is just listing some of the options they found on Trenitalia. They did not make these routes up themselves. The problem is that Trenitalia lists so many, and with different numbers of connections (up to 4).

For Manarola to Venice, Trenitalia gives one the choice between the two routes—-via Firenze or via Milan. A search for this journey for a particular date (I chose April 6) starting at 8 am yields an initial array of 10 route options, about 1/3 of them via Milan and the rest via Firenze (some of those with a change at Pisa). One can get more (with afternoon departure times) by using the “later” button.

Then it is up to the person searching to choose the route and departure time they want. And that is what the OP is asking for help with.

Thanks, Lola, yes, these are options I found on Trenitalia--I'm trying to decide among them. I suppose my main question is: longer journey but fewer connections VS shorter journey with connections (some of them on the tighter side?)

I will note that when we did this, I started my search with bahn.de to identify possible routes/schedules, and then went to Trenitalia to find the one I like and buy. I noticed that the bahn.de search results were more limited, and did not include routes with very short connection times—-which I took to mean that they did not trust Trenitalia to make those short connections. In fact at that time Trenitalia did not even list the Levanto option, IC 666, as a possible connection from Manarola. So I checked and made sure we could get from Manarola to Levanto in plenty of time for the direct IC train from Levanto to Milan (IC 666), and bought Levanto to Milan and Manarola to Levanto as separate tickets, leaving plenty of time between.

Now I see they do offer that route, with 14 minutes to connect at Levanto, which should be fine (unless the Clinique Terre local trains are totally messed up). But in any case, the need to get from Manarola to either La Spezial to the south or Monterosso, or Levanto to the north to catch an onward IC, Regional, or Frecce train.

To answer your question, our personal choice is the fewest connections, even if it is a slightly longer journey ( up to an hour, no more). Time spent riding the train can be pleasant and relaxing; time spent hopping off one train and on to another is not.