Italian Train Travel

Travel By Rail Through Italy

Italy has a wonderful rail system. Trains are frequent, fast, comfortable, and they run on time.

Speaking of which, did Mussolini make the trains run on time?

No. Mussolini did not make the trains run on time. That claim was Fascist propaganda.

The Italian railway system was in bad shape after World War I, but most of the redesign and construction was underway before Mussolini and the Fascists took power in 1922.

Mussolini's regime built some magnificent central stations in major cities, and it improved some main lines in northern Italy on which politicians, businessmen, and comfort-focused foreign tourists rode. British tour companies then repeated Mussolini's claims, and got the myth into international newspapers and magazines. But Italy's trains did not, as a general rule, run on time under Mussolini's rule.

Now, however, Italian trains do run on time. Here are pictures and descriptions of what I experienced during a trip to Italy in 2025, visiting Roma, Napoli, Pompeii, Salerno, and Perugia; and then taking a ferry to Sicily and visiting Palermo, Milazzo, Messina, Taormina, Siracusa, and Agrigento. Other than the ferry connection between Napoli and Palermo, all of my travel was via RFI, Rete Ferroviaria Italiana, the Italian Rail Network.

Italy is rugged, and some of the lines are marvels of engineering. Above, you're looking down from 200 meters above the rail line along the shore below Taormina. A freight train is running north toward Messina.

Buying Tickets

Don't buy your tickets in advance through an overseas travel agent! That approach would have you paying far more for tickets with limited flexibility.

As for overnight trains, do buy those tickets in advance but buy them through the Trenitalia web site.

Otherwise, simply walk into the station and buy your own tickets.

The ticket machines are bright red and easy to spot:

Foreign visitors need to realize that Italians speak Italian and they refer to their cities by their real names, not the different names used by English speakers.

Also know that "Centrale" is often abbreviated as "C.le" on tickets and on schedule boards in stations.

The real Italian names will be printed on your tickets, which is helpful because you know what to look for on the platform signs to be certain as to when to get off.

However, the trains run precisely on time or very close to that most of the time, and intermediate station stops tend to be short. So, you need to have your luggage down off the racks and be standing near the door before your train stops at the station.

Select your language:

Notice that you can modify an existing reservation, get a refund for an unused ticket, or collect printed tickets for an online purchase. But most of the time you want to buy a new ticket.

The next page on the touch screen interface will assume that you're buying a ticket to depart from that station, but you could press Modify departure to buy a ticket leaving from somewhere else.

The user interface is well designed, the default or most obvious choice is usually what you want.

The most commonly-purchased five to eight destinations will be shown, press one of those to make that your arrival station. Otherwise, you can enter another arrival station. This example is when I was at Palermo Central and was purchasing a ticket to Milazzo.

At the next screen you can specify One Way or Round Trip, and you could press the calendar to choose a later date. Change the number of travelers, and press Continue

Now you will see a list of choices, starting with the next train if you left the date as today, or starting with the first train of the day if you selected a different date. Be careful, make sure that you will have enough time to finish the purchase, make your way to the platform, and get on board before the doors are closed a minute before departure!

This trip would be on two Regionale trains in a row, #21820 from Palermo Centrale to Termini Imerese, then #22292 from there to Milazzo.

Those are Regionale trains so seats aren't assigned. I chose a 2nd Class ticket so I need to ride in a 2nd Class car, but I can sit in any unoccupied seat.

For the high-speed trains, or the InterCity trains which run the length of the peninsula, some of them overnight, the system will automatically assign me a seat. But then I can press a button on this page to modify that seat assignment choice.

At that point I'm ready to press Forward. If I were buying a ticket on a train with reserved seating, I would also need to enter some personal information. Since I'm not Italian and I don't have a national ID card to touch to the wireless card reader, I would select manual entry and put in my name, family name, and email address. That doesn't have to be precisely correct, but the system will try to mail the ticket details to the provided email address.

Maybe you're concerned about privacy and don't want to enter that information. So, sure, you could enter bogus data. But... aren't you about to pay with a credit card and undergo roughly the same data exposure? And if you're paying with cash, how did you get that cash? Besides, Italy is part of the EU and thus subject to GDPR personal data protection. Your personal data is far safer in Europe than it is in the U.S. Actually, it's safer pretty much anywhere else in the world than it is in the U.S.

The touchless reader below the screen is for the Italian identity card. Pay by inserting your credit card into the slot, or by feeding bills and cash into the appropriate slots. The freshly printed tickets will drop into the slot down below.

Validate Before Boarding!

Adult Supervision will not be there to help you. The first official you will see will be the conductor on board the train checking to see that you are in the correct seat of the correct train with a validated ticket.

Be careful to always validate your ticket before boarding the train. Expect to find these little machines near the ticket vending machine. Sometimes they're on the platform, like these examples, but not always.

The result is a rather faint date and time stamp along with the station, NAPOLIC.LE for Napoli Centrale. Plus, a partial round punch through the ticket, faintly visible here.

High-Speed Trains

Frecciarossa or "Red Arrow" is the premier service of Trenitalia, operating at speeds up to 300 km/h. There are sister brands Frecciargento or "Silver Arrow", running up to 250 km/h, and Frecciabianca or "White Arrow", running at a maximum of 200 km/h on mainline tracks only.

The Frecciarossa 1000 is a Hitachi and Bombardier collaboration. It's designed for operation at speeds of 360–400 km/h.

During my visit, the tracks were not ready for speeds above 300 km/h, so that was the speed limit.

The trains are electrically powered from the overhead pantograph. The Frecciarossa run on 25 kV AC on the high-speed lines, 1,500 V DC power on the normal lines.

The trains have eight cars each. The cars at each end have drivers' cabs, but they don't serve as the locomotive. Every car is powered, balancing the load for accelerating and decelerating. Sixteen induction motors, 9,800–10,000 KW power for the entire train.

Similar E1000 series trains operate internationally to France and within Spain: Milano-Torino-Modane-Chambéry-Lyon-Paris, and Madrid to Barcelona, Sevilla, and Valencia

The ETR 1000 was the latest and highest-performance train operating when I was there. ETR 500, 600, and 700 were older models.

Frecciarossa is the premier service of Trenitalia, the national operator. The private company .italo is a competitor, whose market would appear to be:

• Visitors who want a complete hand-holding experience from ticket purchase through boarding
• People who want to appear to be oligarchs
• Actual oligarchs

Anyway, this is an .italo ETR 675.

Regionale Trains

These are some of the newer commuter and regional trains.

This is a slightly older model.

Older coaches have a higher climb up from the platform.

This train pulling into the Salerno station will take me to Napoli Centrale in about 37–39 minutes.

This regional train in the Palermo Centrale station took me to Termini Imerese, where I changed to a train that continued east along the north coast of Sicily.

Later in the trip, this bright green train took me south through central Sicily from Termini Imerese on the north coast to Agrigento on the south coast.

Different designs of Regionale trains wait in Agrigento Centrale.

At the Station

I flew into Rome's Fiumicino Airport and took the Leonardo Express, a frequent train connecting the airport to Roma Termini. I assumed that the name indicated that it was the start and end of many routes. No, it's in a neighborhood named Termini because there were prominent baths here during Roman times, and Latin thermae became Italian termini.

Napoli Centrale is large and chaotic, although not so much so as Roma Termini.

Smaller cities still have busy stations. Here are ten departures from Salerno within the next hour.

About one train per hour in each direction stops at Paestum, several pass through at high speed without stopping.

Palermo Centrale has several arrivals and departures every hour.

Its chapel is just beyond the arrival and departure boards.

The schedule board and ticket machine in the Milazzo station:

Milazzo is at the base of a narrow peninsula, of course the rail line can't run through the center. I used Google Maps to verify the route to walk to my lodging, about a kilometer from the station toward the port.

The reviews of the station were filled with angry complaints: no multi-lingual station staff to sell tickets, no bars and restaurants in the station, it isn't in the center of town, and on and on. One person claimed that it was the worst train station he had ever seen, suggesting that it must be about the only train station he has seen. The most ridiculous complaining was from the people who were angrily entering their screeds into Google Maps while complaining that there was no way to know how to get from the station to the center.

I could not let that nonsense stand unmocked.

About the clocks: Chicago's Union Station has clocks within the station and out on the platforms showing the time and date.

The clocks will be up to eight hours behind or ahead, while the calendar will be up to nine month behind.

The Taormina-Giardini station is down by the waterline, about 220 meters below the town of Taormina.

Buses running about every 30 minutes connect the train station to the bus station high above on the edge of the town.

The interior is elaborately decorated. Wonderful ticket windows, but you need to buy your own ticket from the machine in the passageway.

The arrival and departure boards show that trains are scheduled to arrive here and then depart just one minute later. The only exception is IC 724, an InterCity, stopping for two minutes while running from Siracusa near the southern corner of Sicily to Roma Termini in the middle of the peninsula. It will cross the Strait of Messina on a ferry!

There is one daily night train that runs between Palermo and Siracusa, on Sicily, and Milano, near the border with Switzerland. Two other overnight trains and two daytime trains run as far as Rome. Going north, shorter InterCity trains start in both Palermo in Sicily's northwest and Siracusa in the south. The coaches and sleepers are loaded into ferries at Messina and carried across the strait. There, they are assembled into a single train heading north through Salerno, Napoli, Rome, and possibly on to Milano.

Agrigento has an attractive station.

It has a somewhat Art Deco chapel.

That chair in the apse, beyond the altar — is that an actual cathedra? Is the chapel inside Agrigento Centrale train station the seat of a bishop, and thus a cathedral?

The plaque on the wall beyond the altar is from the local railway workers, pledging to work for the good of society in honor of a Papal visit to Agrigento in July 1993. Nothing about the Pope being in this chapel, though. Or about the chapel becoming a cathedral.

InterCity

There are five InterCity trains each day between Sicily and cities on the mainland. Two in each direction leave during the morning and arrive at their final destinations in the evening. The other three are ICN or InterCity Notte sleeper trains with four-berth couchettes and one, two, and three-bed compartments.

I was on one of these for the first segment of its trip north, from Siracusa to Messina. This was the first InterCity train of the day out of Siracusa, it was preparing to leave at 07:43.

We would stop in Catania and Taormina-Giardini before reaching Messina at 10:15.

Here's the view looking south out of the Messina Centrale complex. A second section of that InterCity would have left Palermo at 07:05 to arrive here at roughly the same time.

They remove the locomotives and push the two sets of passenger cars onto specially designed ferries that have two tracks in their vehicle deck. Below you see one of those train ferries crossing Messina's harbor.

The train that I was on had left Siracusa at 07:43 and would reach Roma Termini at 18:34. I would prefer to try one of the sleeper trains. Three run every day, one of them all the way to and from Milano, skipping past Napoli and Roma.

Why ferries, why is there no bridge or tunnel?

The Strait of Messina is wide and deep, but a much worse problem is the major fault running north to south through the strait. The African Plate is pushing underneath the Eurasian Plate nearby. This region is seismically and volcanically very active. An earthquake in 1908 created a tsunami and killed about 100,000 people. The below map shows the major fault through the strait and nearby volcanos — Vulcano in yellow and Stromboli in red in the Aeolian Islands north of Sicily, and Etna in red southwest of the strait.

On Board

There are great views. Here is the view between Termini Imerese and Agrigento, crossing central Sicily.

On a Regionale train approaching Milazzo, some of the Aeolian Islands are dimly visible.

And, zipping along at 300 km/h on the Frecciarossa running from Roma Termini to Napoli Centrale.

Inside a Frecciarossa 2nd class car:

This is an InterCity coach being used on a Regionale route.

The newer Regionale trains have bright color schemes.

Yes, there is AC power at each pair of seats.

In 2009, I was on some local trains in northern Italy where the toilet was still the old design that dropped waste directly onto the tracks. Things are much better now. Above is a toilet on a Regionale train.

Below is the airline-style toilet and washbasin on the Frecciarossa.

Other Trains

The Leonardo Express runs every 20 minutes between Roma Fiumicino Airport and Roma Termini.

Several cities have streetcars, this is one in Roma. To buy a ticket, look for a sign with a T and the word Tabacchi. The tobacco shops sell bus and streetcar tickets. Validate your ticket when you board, or risk heavy fines.

The city of Perugia has the completely automated Mini-Metro.

You buy a ticket from a machine and go through the turnstyles. A small car soon arrives, glides to a smooth stop, and opens its doors. You get in and off it goes. It's completely automatic, there is no driver. Several of the little cars travel along the Mini-Metro line, so it is always a short wait for the next one.

The Mini-Metro is clean, fast, efficient, and very low cost to ride. As the little cars are moved by a set of cables, the system of cars can use itself as counterweights and minimize the energy needed to operate the system.

And of course there are freight trains. Here's one passing slowly through Salerno station.

And, a freight train through the Taormina-Giardini station.

Compared to Home...

Compare this to the United States outside the two main rail corridors of San Diego — Los Angeles and Washington — Boston. The few cities with rail service mostly have a train passing through only every day or two.

I live in West Lafayette, Indiana, and there's an Amtrak station within walking distance of my home. It's on the route of The Cardinal, which runs between New York City and Chicago. However, it only runs three days a week in each direction. And, it's an old train.

You ride in Amfleet II coaches, which were built in 1980–1983 so they're now over 42 years old. The locomotives pulling the train are P42DC units that came out in 1996, 29 years ago. As of 2025, they were beginning to be replaced by the ALC-42, a design from 2017.

From New York City to Washington D.C., Amtrak owns the rail line and the train can travel at 175 km/h, the limit of the P42DC locomotive (Amfleet II coaches are rated at 200 km/h, as are the newer ALC-42 locomotive). However, once the train leaves Amtrak's Northeast Corridor line in central Virginia, track quality limits speed to 105 km/h.

Finally, Italian train stations seem chaotic, but that's because they're so busy. Things flow and people know what they're doing. In the U.S., constant booming announcements on overhead loudspeakers remind you every few minutes of what to do, and not to accept any candy or luggage from strangers, and not to lose your own luggage, and not to fall off the platform onto the tracks, and on and on. Public transportation in the U.S. treats the American traveler like an accident-prone and rather dim-witted child. With good reason, I suppose.