Train travel from Florence to FCO-timing?

I personally would never schedule my last day of vacation to travel from one city to another city's airport for an international flight home. Too many variables in that equation. Train problems, strikes, inadvertent bad weather, too far to travel. If ANYTHING stops or delays your train it's not like you can easily just hail a taxi to take you to FCO Airport. Of course, that's just me.

Work it backwards, you want to be checking in no later than 1:45. Figure 30 min travel time on the LE plus a worst case wait of 30 min, so arriving at Termini from Florence by 12:45. Then an hour and a half travel by fast train, lets call it getting a train from Florence no later than 11:00 AM. I would add a buffer, maybe plan to grab a sandwich or something to eat at Termini, not rush so much. If you want, you could leave several hours earlier, stash the bags and take a walk.

Sure, some risk, maybe keep an eye on Strike announcements, have a back up plan, but it looks doable.

jane,

As your flight isn't until 15:45, you have some flexibility. I'd probably use a departure from Firenze SMN at about 10:00, which should get you to FCO at about 12:30. That's probably a bit early, but it doesn't hurt to have a bit of extra time in case of any problems.

It might be a good idea to ask the hotel staff in Florence if there are any strikes planned for your travel day, as that will affect the travel times and you wouldn't want to miss your flight.

Thank you for the advice.
My next question is whether I should be attempting to buy tickets in advance for the round trip train Rome-Florence in mid-June. I have been reading various entries re: the difficulties in navigating the trenitalia website. Is this something that I need to do or can I buy the tickets while in Italy?

Jane, you can easily purchase the tickets in Italy. The most common reason for buying tickets in advance is to take advantage of the nicely discounted tickets which are non-refundable. Buying tickets on the Trenitalia website can be done but it can sometimes be quite troublesome. One nice alternative is to buy your tickets on Trenitalia's competitor Italo www.italotreno.it Nice new trains. The one difference is that the Italo train goes to Roma-Tiburtina in Rome. Roma-Tiburtina also has trains that go to FCO. They take a bit longer because they are not non-stop expresses like the Leonardo Express but the fare is about 6Euro cheaper.

You may need the extra time as Ken suggested because you will be using Terminal 5 for international flights directly back to the US. And this terminal can get jammed with the departing flights back to the US in the afternoon.

Thank you for your thoughts.

So, the main advantage to buying tickets in advance is to get the significant discount. Given that I now have 6 weeks or so in advance, approximately how much do you think that the savings would be per one way ticket? (I am wondering if it is worth it to spend a weekend day slugging it out with the trenitalia website.)

Do you think that there is any chance that the trains from Rome-Florence or Florence-Rome will sell out seats for dates in mid-June?

The seats will not sell out and it should not take more than hour to get your tickets on trenitalia.com. You will need to check today to see which discounts are still available. The number of discount tickets are limited by train and schedule. Super economy are the cheapest and sell out quickly the first few days available. Economy are next and sell a little slower. But they could be gone by now also. Only way to know is to get on the web site and check.