study abroad in Florence

Rail passes are very unlikely to make sense - buying point-to-point tickets in Italy will likely be her best option to travel around the country. If you purchase in advance and lock into a certain time, you can get really significant savings for the fast trains. Prices of regional trains don't change whether you buy them in advance or not. (Note: there is a discount card she probably qualifies for with her age, for 40€ and gives a 10% discount off base fares. But that discount doesn't qualify for the discounted economy or super-economy fares you can get when you purchase in advance - and those fares are often greater than 10% off. She'd have to spend over 400€ on regional trains or base fares for fast trains to make it worth it.)

For a cell phone to call/text her friends in Italy, I would recommend using an unlocked phone--purchase one here or in Italy--and a local SIM card (I used the TIM phone company). Depending on how long she's staying, she might want to look into the weekly plans they offer. For example, for 1€ a week I could text all other TIM numbers for free and I had a SIM card that brought the price down to 12 cents per minute for calls to the US. This was much cheaper than calls on ATT's old international plan (I don't know about their current rates but doubt they could compete). I typically used Skype or Facetime over wifi to talk to my family in the US, but if it were an emergency or if I wanted to call, I could do so cheaply on my TIM SIM card/phone. She can either go to a TIM store to top off her credit or go to a Tabacchi. It is very easy.

Either get an unlocked phone here and buy a sim card there and load it as needed or buy a cheap phone there. DO NOT rent a phone.

Rail passes are from another era -- they are rarely a good deal financially. She can buy tickets ahead for long trips and use local commuter trains for short trips in the area.

When we were there the American church was doing a lot of outreach to students and there were a lot of American students participating. I don't know if the new pastor is focused that way but if she is part of a religious community, she might want to check that out.

gratuitous unsolicited advice: my daughter became extremely competent in her semester abroad, arranging long distance travel, organizing group travel etc. old enough to go live in Italy, old enough to figure this stuff out and own it.

Overseas study programs have resident coordinators who can help with all the above. She'll catch on very quickly. She can skype for the first day or so until she gets a local phone.

Get a GSM UNLOCKED QUAD PHONE. If her contract with her current phone is over two years old, she can get it unlocked and use her phone. The important thin is to make sure it's a quad band (Europe uses different frequencies) and is a GSM system phone. In America the carriers using GSM are AT&T and T-Mobile. My unlocked iPhone (with AT&T) works perfectly with Italian SIM cards.

She just needs to buy a SIM card once she gets there.
Tim, Vodafone, Wind are the largest providers and they have stores everywhere in Florence.
If she has a smart phone, she can buy a data plan. They don't require contracts. You just refill it with money when you use up the money in the SIM card. You can refill a SIM card with any denomination above five euro at any cellular store or at tobacconists' shops.

Although the residential coordinator her program may have might be able to help with some of these, not all are very knowledgeable! (I had one that was not very useful. The program directors were fine but the RA-type employee didn't know much at all about being abroad or Italy in specific.) So do feel free to keep asking questions - or searching these forums as many questions have been answered before.

Italy is very competitive in terms of good pre-paid cellphone options. I think the majority of cellphones in Italy are pre-paid. Subscription plans are more a business thing.

Buy or take (from US) an unlocked quad-frequency smartphone (all major non-low-cost smartphones fit it like iPhones, Samsung Galaxy, Lumia, Nexus etc), and then, once there, she can buy prepaid SIM cards with data plans included. It will be more expensive to buy a new (smart)phone in Italy than in US.

There is no need for rail passes for long-term use in Italy. She can just buy advanced tickets with deep discounted fares.

we did a day trip to Florence on a very high speed train with Italo train which was just perfect.
getting an unlocked phone and buying sim is what we did and for 9euro we had 1 month unlimited internet

My daughter is there now on a semester study abroad. I can answer the cell phone question, at least from our experience. Study Abroad Italy (SAI), based in California, runs the semester abroad program and contracts with Studentcells (http://www.studentcells.com/content/01.aspx). The program arranges for the cell phones to be provided to the students when they arrive in Florence and covers the activation fee, but of course the student is required to pay for calls, text messages, etc. Can also purchase optional insurance on the phone to cover loss or damage. The calling plan is selected before arrival in Italy, and every 2 weeks, our credit card is charged (no paper bills to receive). Call rates and texting are fairly cheap within Italy, but roaming charges outside of Italy are quite expensive. One nice feature is that while our daughter is in Italy, she can receive calls for free from the U.S. In this regard, we can call her from the U.S. very cheaply on our landline through Verizon (they have a global plan for $10 per month for 300 minutes). So, basically, 3.3 cents a minute for us and no cost to our daughter when we call her. We also use FaceTime on our iPhones when I am away from home and she has access to wifi, as she brought her iPhone solely for this purpose. Hope this helps.

I took a look at the website Robert suggested, and here are some of the prices: Call any landline and cell phone in Italy at 25¢ /min, Call any landline and cell phone in the US at 28¢ /min, Text internationally at 30¢ per text

Using a TIM (or Vodafone, or Wind, etc) sim card will be much cheaper. I believe the price for texts to the US were cheaper (although I typically just used wifi on my iPhone and used iMessage. There are other apps that could work.). I called the US for 12 cents/minute, and other Italian phones for even less.

The website advertises no deposit, no activation fee, etc... But if you buy a very simple phone through TIM it costs 30€, a sim card costs 10€ and includes 5€ credit. It is pay as you go, and your daughter can just top off her credit as she needs by going to a TIM store or a tabacchi. To me, this is much simpler than a monthly bill. Additionally, you don't have to return the phone at the end of it! Sure, if she loses it she may have to buy another, but there is no fee for breaking it or not turning it in at the end.

I'm not trying to be rude about others' suggestions, I hope no one takes it that way, but as a person who studied abroad in Tuscany just a few years ago - buying a TIM sim card was the best and cheapest option for me.

She needs to have an itinerary plan before she can compare the value of a railpass using tools at http://www.ricksteves.com/travel-tips/transportation/trains. I know many students don't plan much before they go, but she has plenty of time to start now for next year.

Train tickets within Italy are relatively cheap to buy there, and advance-purchase discounts are also available. She would be most likely to use a pass if she has a period of a couple of weeks traveling outside of Italy (such as during spring break, or after school ends). Most railpasses last for a period of two months, which starts when you activate the pass at a train station. There are a few overnight train options from Florence (pretty expensive, to Munich, Vienna, Paris) which are cheaper if booked up to 3 months ahead of the travel dates. Flying from Florence or Pisa can be a still-cheaper way to get to another country; see www.skyscanner.com.

Have you checked out STA (Student Travel Assoc.)? There are some options available to students that aren't available to the rest of us.

@Devon: There may surely be cheaper alternatives to procuring a cell phone for a semester in Italy, but certainly there cannot be any that were simpler/more convenient than Study Abroad Italy's (SAI) arrangement with Studentcells. For me, that holds some value. For example, students were automatically assigned a cell phone upon online registration and received their assigned cell phone number via email approximately two weeks before departure for Italy. They picked up their cell phone upon check-in at their apartment in Florence. As part of the Study Abroad Italy program, the following features were included with the service: (1) No initial fees or deposit - phone and activation fee were already paid by SAI. The user only pays for outgoing calls and texts. (2) Included a complimentary phone and a rental SIM. (3) Incoming calls (even from the U.S.) and voice mail are free while in Italy, and receiving a text in Europe is always free. There were no worries about having to replenish (Euro-wise) SIM cards, and auto-billing to my credit card made paying simple. For the record, the TOTAL cost of my daughter's cell phone usage from the end of January until last week has been 51 Euros, and there are only 3 weeks left in the semester. As I mentioned in my prior post, we have also communicated form iPhone to iPhone via FaceTime, which is free, but my daughter has to have access to wifi for that. I hope that this information is helpful for others with children planning to study abroad. My take home message is that ease of cell phone acquisition, combined with special program plans, may be worth the little extra cost versus the absolute cheapest do-it-yourself route. And, from my experience, 51 Euros total for 12 weeks cell phone usage is not really a very expensive alternative.

Thank you all for your responses to my question. I'm going to print them all off and take to our local Verizon phone store to see what they say. My daughter has an Iphone4. I purchased a international plan for myself last summer when I traveled to England and it didn't work for making phone calls to the States, though I could receive calls. Mostly I used it for communicating through email when I had a Wi-Fi connection. I'm hoping we'll find a better solution for my daughter. Again, thanks for your ideas and suggestions.

From personal experience, your Verizon info needs to come from a rep with European phone expertise. Good luck.