We will be staying in Padova and flying in through Bologna. We will visit Venice, Verona and San Marino, and are looking for the best deals for traveling by train. Are there rail passes that are better deals than buying individual tickets?

For so few and such short trips, a rail pass would be of no benefit. The best deals will be had through advance purchase through the official website. Note that the slowest class of train (R for Regionale) will have no discounts.

Here's the official site for your routes:

http://www.fsitaliane.it/cms/v/index...0080a3e90aRCRD

It's doubtful you are traveling enough to justify a pass. If you know exactly when you want to travel, you can buy tickets for the faster trains on Trenitalia and see if you can snag some advance purchase discounts.

You can take a regional train from Padova to Verona for 6.30€. The faster trains (18€ regular price, 9€ discount price) are only 5-10 minutes faster on this route.

Padova/Venice is under 4€ for the regional train.

San Marino will require some bus transport. Trains don't go everywhere and often a bus is the better option (sometimes just as fast even when there is train service). Are you staying in San Marino? You couldn't easily do it as a day trip from Padova (most connections would reguire a change in Bologna), but I seem to recall buses from the Bologna airport to Rimini if you wanted to put it at the first of your trip (or the end).

You can use either www.trenitalia.com OR www.italiarail.com to buy tickets in advance. I find the latter site a lot easier to use.

Italiarail is a reseller which puts more restrictions on the tickets than the actual Italian rail company Trenitalia. You don't want to buy any tickets for R trains in advance online as there are additional restrictions that aren't on the tickets if you buy them at the train stations (you can buy all your tickets at the same time at the first train station you encounter) or at any shops with the Trenitalia logo. A lot of small convenience type shops will see tickets.