Renting a car

To get a rough idea of your options, go to rome2rio.com and put in your town in CT, and Paris. You have either a 12 hour train ride (meaning probably an overnight in the middle) or some combination of train and flying. You might have to query in two steps, CT to Geneva, Geneva to Paris, to get a better idea of options, since Geneva does not seem to be a "natural" connection point. Note that you can put in your dates on the secondary screen where you choose date and see actual routing times. Renting a car might be cost prohibitive since you are picking up in one country and dropping in another...

If you want to drive to Paris, my suggestion would be to take the train from CT to Nice and rent the car in France. Renting a car in one country and returning it in another incurs a drop off fee of several hundred euros (€400-700). To avoid it, pick the car up in France. If you want to drive through Geneva, make sure to buy a Swiss road carnet to avoid fines if using highways in Switzerland.

Travel first, see sights second: Easy Jet Pisa to Orly 3:15pm-4:55pm $74.00 pp

What are our options?

What is the time frame?

As already noted picking up car in Italy and dropping it off in France will have what most consider 'punitive' one way fees.

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As the others have mentioned, using a rental car for that type of Itinerary is not the best idea. In addition to large extra charges for renting in one country and dropping in another, there are several other issues......

• With rental cars, each driver listed on the rental form will require an International Driver's Permit (compulsory for Italy, highly advisable for France).
• For driving in Italy you'd need to be extremely vigilant to avoid the ZTL (limited traffic) areas, as there are hefty fines for EACH pass through one. You likely wouldn't know you've been nicked until several months after you return home when you start seeing mysterious charges appear on your credit card.
• With a car rented in Italy and driven in Switzerland, you'd need to purchase a Swiss Highway Tax Vignette. Hefty fines if you're caught without one, and those are usually collected on the spot.
• You'd need to watch your speeds carefully as there are automated speed cameras in many places in Europe.
• Did I mention the high cost of fuel, CDW and the possibility of having luggage stolen from your car.

Do you know yet which of the five Cinque Terre towns you plan to stay in? If you don't have accommodations booked for July yet, you'll need to get on that SOON.

Travel by train would be the easiest and most efficient method, especially when using the high speed trains which travel at up to 300 km/h.

Rather than go through Geneva, I'd suggest going through Lucerne and then Basel which has direct high speed trains to Paris. The shortest and easiest trip from Monterosso (CT) is 6H:47M with one change. Lucerne is a beautiful city and there are some good day trip possibilities from there such as Mt. Pilatus, cruises on the lake, etc. If you haven't yet visited the Berner Oberland, that would be another fantastic place to see. How much time have you got for that portion of your trip? You could allocate a few days to Lucerne and a few to the Berner Oberland.

Travel by rail from either Lucerne or the Berner Oberland to Basel SBB is very easy on the super efficient Swiss rail network. From Basel it's an easy and quick 3 hours or so to Paris via the high speed TGV.