Travel from Venice to Cinque Terre

Use the website Rome To Rio. You plug in your start and finish destination, and it will give you multiple solutions.
If you plan on using a train and want to know more use the website The Man in Seat 61 for train travel.

We are not interested in renting a car and driving ourselves.

Good choice. Nobody drives in the mountains when there are trains running under them. I mean both the mountains between Venice and the Ligurian Sea and the mountains between the five villages. Without mentioning that a car in the Cinque Terre would be an only expensive nuisance that would remain parked somewhere outside the villages to avoid ZTL fines and traffic.

You can go by train from Venezia Mestre or from Venezia S. Lucia station to any of the Cinque Terre Villages. Both the departure and the arrival station depend on where you are staying.

The route depends on where you are headed, too. If you pick Monterosso, the biggest village of the five, you'd go via Milan to minimize changes and have reserved seats all the way from Venice to Monterosso. If you decided to stay in Manarola or Riomaggiore, 2 smaller villages close to La Spezia, you'd train via Florence and/or Pisa.

Check Trenitalia.com for train schedules and for booking your tickets.

This is a long journey that will take 5-7 hours, and will involve 1-3 train connections depending on the route you choose.

The most direct route is taking the freccia ( high speed) train from Venezia S.Lucia, to Monterosso, with a change at Milano Centrale.

My mom and I stayed in Monterosso when we visited the Cinque Terre many years ago.
You can easily visit the other villages via train, or ferry, except for Corniglia which you can reach by climbing many stairs or via bus.

When are you planning this trip?

Enjoy!

At this point we plan on staying in Manarola but are open to suggestions for other villages. We will be there mid June of 2023.

The simplest journey (fewest changes);is the route Pricilla suggested, via Milan. If you depart Venice Santa Lucia at 10:48 on the fast train to Milan, you can change there to IC669 which gores to Monterosso with no further changes. You can change to the regional train to Manarola at Monterosso, or at the earlier station of Levanto ( which is the way we did it).

Manarola is a good choice. We were so glad we chose that village after hiking to Vernazza and finding that town so crowded we had trouble finding a place for lunch. Finally popped into a bakery and bought their last 3 piadinini for the 4 of us to share. Then we could not find a place to sit down to eat—-all benches and tops of stone walls were occupied. A kind shopkeeper took notice of our plight and said we could sit on the steps to her shop as long as we did not block them. After eating we stopped inside the shop to thank her and I bought a scarf. Then we were ready to head home to Manarola, but the train station was so crowded we had to wait through several trains before we could board one, and rode standing by the door the short distance back to Manarola to enjoy the relative peace there.