Trenitalia Venice to Assisi Tickets Guaranteed?

1. Yes as you describe it but not the reverse. All regionale trains are like a bus on rail. All open seating. No seat? Stand till one becomes available. ALL other trains in Italy have reservations for seats and you must have a ticket for that seat.

2. NO

3.. A little patience. Keep watching. Generally the Regionale and slower train schedules are release last.

You've got 35-45 minutes in Florence. Unless something major happens I doubt you'll miss your connection. But with an electronic ticket, you have 4 hours from the time your original connecting regionale train departed to catch the next regionale.

When I looked on the Trenitalia website I saw prices for that train on Oct 19. Usually if prices are posted you can purchase. So something went wrong with your order. Does your CC company know you are making international purchases?

You are doing something wrong. When we say that Regionale schedules up to December 12 are released last, we mean right before the deadline of June 11, not after. Otherwise it wouldn't be a deadline anymore.

Put Assisi as arrival station and get the bus ticket to the upper town in Assisi, trenitalia.com can't sell the tickets of all city buses.

If you keep on seeing an error message, you may be picking a fare reserved to Trenitalia's fidelity card holders. Or you may be checking the site in the middle of the night, sometimes webmasters work on a site during the small hours.

I have made a fake purchase picking the one-change option at 13:26 on the 16th and I could get to the page where you enter name and credit card #.

All connections are protected when you miss a train because of Trenitalia. When you miss a regionale train, you can freely take the next one to your final destination. When you miss a train with reserved seats, you must get for free a new ticket and a new seat reservation at the counter.

Yes, I just put that in for Oct 16 and got departures at 9:26, and 11:26 taking 5 1/3 hours costing from 38.70 to 46 EUR. 1 change at Florence SMN.

Thanks everyone for the quick responses and guidance! I'll give this another try.

October is ages away. Trains are mass transit, used by people to go about their daily business. If you were to go to the Venice station right now and buy a ticket to Assisi you would get one, and you would be on your way soon.

Just like Americans do not make appointments to have their car fuelled months in advance Italians do not buy train tickets months in advance. As a result the system is not really set up to deal properly with people who already want to nail down what is rather trivial trip already now.

The only reason to buy tickets in advance is to get discounts, and to avoid have to queue at the station or deal with a ticket vending machine. (These are however quite straightforward to use though.) For the discounts it is not necessary to book that far in advance though.

Also with train tickets the railways must get you to your destination. So if you miss a connection due to a delay you can take the next train. And that applies even if the next train is a hight speed or intercity with compulsory reservation. You may have to talk to a train conductor in that case however.

Last remark: Have a look at Italo. They are often a bit cheaper than Trenitalia.