Train tickets

Which cities? Do you want the main stations, usually in the city center or historic area?

Some examples:

Venice: Venezia Santa Lucia
Rome: Roma Termini
Florence: Firenze Santa Maria Novella
Bologna: Bologna Centrale
Naples: Napoli Centrale

Other stations tend to be in the suburbs or in less touristed areas of cities.

Are you using the Trenitalia website?

Right. As Zoe mentioned, it would be helpful to have an idea of your itinerary, and approximately where your accommodations are located. The stations she listed are pretty standard for most visitors to those cities - as is Milano Centrale for Milan.

This is a little more work than just asking here. Goggle the city you want, that should bring up the Wikipedia reference on the city with a reference to transportation, train stations in that city, and general a map so you can see where each train station is location. It is very important to know the exact name of the station, it's Italian spelling. Sometimes only certain trains will go to certain stations so that needs to checked carefully.

Hi, here's an easy way. Just enter your hotels into the rome2rio.com site, and it will give you the map and the train station names for your connections & end points.

This is great information! I had gone on the trenitalia site but that was where I started to get confused because when you had to enter your to & from locations, you had to choose specifically which station you wanted. These posts have pretty much covered most of my itinerary. I think Cinque Terre and the lake region are the only two other areas that I will need to look into.

Thanks!

OK, I'll bite.

Both of your remaining places are areas (not towns) covered by multiple stations, in many cases one per village or town.

Where in Cinque Terre, and where are you arriving from?

Where in what you (and Rick) call the lakes area, but Italians do not? Which lake - Garda, Maggiore, Como, etc? Which towns or villages? Then we can tell you the names of the appropriate stations.

Most smaller towns only have one station. For the towns of the Cinque Terre, you can simply use each town name. Varenna-Esino is the name of that town's station, as mentioned in guidebooks. Traveling in both areas tends to require a connection by regional train, which is not reserved, and which you normally would not book online.