Some tips on booking trains in Italy
Booking train travel in Italy can be a little confusing. Roughly speaking there are three different types of train in Italy: regional, intercity and Eurostar Italia. For the regional and intercity trains you need to buy a ticket (at the ticket office or at the self-service machines at the station) and then stamp the ticket at the special machines at the station before boarding the train (it will cost you 8 euros to get your ticket stamped on board). For the Eurostar trains you need both a ticket and a reservation for a particular train. As far as we can tell, the Eurostar trains connect Milan, Venice, Bolgona, Florence, Rome and Naples.
When it comes to buying Eurostar Italia tickets and reservations, some well-known sites that allow you to book train travel in Europe ( raileurope.com and Rick Steves) don't explain things too well. For example, raileurope.com will try to sell you reservations for 10 euros or somesuch and later claim that it is actually unable to secure reservations for you so that you will end up with only the open ticket. So here's our advice.
Visit the Italian rail home page www.trenitalia.com. You can choose the English language version by clicking on the Union Jack. On this page you can check the train schedules.
To get to where you can book tickets, click on the "Special travel offers" link, followed by the "National trains" link, followed by the "Eurostar (ES*)" link, followed by the "How to purchase tickets" link. Scroll down to the "Where to purchase tickets" section and click on the "on-line, via the Internet" link. Unfortunately, at this point the language reverts to Italian so you will either need to understand a little bit of the language or be adept at translating web pages.
Here is the link to get
to this page directly:
Note that you will need to register, then log-in to be able to purchase tickets and reservations.
Here is a link to AltaVista's
Babel Fish page, which you might find helpful for translation purposes.
Note that when you buy the tickets, you can secure reservations for a particular train at the same time, thereby reserving your seats. The reservations are free.