ordering Trenitalia tickets in advance

What you can do is just input a date a month from now in www.trenitalia.com

• If you see only "Ordinaria" fares, then you are looking at a regional train for which you can buy tickets at any time, at a fixed price.
• If you see base, economy and super economy fares then you are looking at trains that do have advance purchase discounts. The "base" fare is the walk up fare you pay on the day itself. So you can for yourself decide wether the tradeoff between cost and flexibility is worth it to you.

For Venice - Turin also look at Italo, they offer that route as well.

As stated this only a cost decision - there is nothing you need to book in advance but several legs you may want to for cost savings.

Get the Trenitalia app and open an account on the website. This will allow you to store your tickets, check schedules, buy tickets and track trains in real time. The private company .Italo also runs fast trains on the big city to big city routes and may allow you to adjust your schedule or cost compare between the two companies. The service is effectively equivalent but they don't run any regionale or local trains.

Have a great trip,
=Tod

I’m all in favor of buying train tickets early, cheaper than last minute. I prefer Business Class when available. Since I travel solo, the single seats on one side of the car work perfect.
If no Business Class with reserved seats I buy tickets on Trenitalia’s app the day before I’m traveling.

BUT don’t do what I just did. Didn’t look at my ticket file and duped a non-refundable ticket. Oh well, it’s only €20 but I think a few more brain cells have jumped ship.

Thank you for the input. I've only ever used Trenitalia so the advice to look at Italo was good. To be honest, I forget they even exist most of the time. Since it's a longer trip, I probably will upgrade to business just to be as comfortable as possible. Normally I do check dates about a month away just to get an idea of cost, times etc., but for some reason that completely slipped my mind. I think I'm working on too many upcoming trips! I think I can safely put this on the back burner until I get back from Switzerland.

Has anyone used the “train line” app? It seems to have better reviews than the other app

Trainline is a 3rd party reseller of the actual Trenitalia and .Italo tickets. It offers some convenience over Trenitalia - you don't have to use the Italian names for cities - but they are ultimately reselling tickets for a fee.

I know some people have said they like it because they will sell you tickets that Trentalia might not at a given time, but if the vendor won't sell them to you I would rather not trust a 3rd party representation of that same ticket. And while I rarely have issues I would rather have purchased from the vendor I'm trying to rebook with than another seller.

Ultimately, I'd place them in the same class as Booking.com and Rome2Rio - potentially useful tools for planning and investigation but I'll actually buy from the actual source whenever possible.

They are a completely legitimate reseller, but they are ultimately a reseller,
=Tod

The seat61.com website hosted by the "The Man In Seat 61" is an excellent resource for train travel tips and info. He doesn't sell tickets but has good advice.

As others have suggested, register accounts for both Trenitalia and Italo. Every week, Italo will email some sort of deal or discount that might be applicable to your trip.

If you know exactly when you'll be travelling, order sooner rather than later. The discounted fares (ie FRECCIADAYS) are limited.

Re the Trainline question -- I use it for a few reasons: in addition to being able to search with both Italian and English place names, you can see Italo and Trenitalia high speed and local trains in the same search vs. two different websites, and I have found the app for my phone to be a very easy way to manage tickets and to get notifications of track numbers and delays. When my husband was under the weather during our trip last year, it was very easy to cancel and rebook (multiple times) on my phone. It does charge a fee when you purchase (not when you reschedule), but in my experience, it has only been a few dollars.