Car or train?
 

Myself, my wife & my two adult daughters (22 & 24) are traveling to italy in the last 1/2 of March. We are flying into Rome on Tuesday, 3/16/04, staying Wednesday night in Florence, Thursday & Friday in Venice, Saturday in Cinque Terre & Sunday through Tuesday night in Rome & have a 6:00 Am flight on Wednesday morning. We are going because we were able to get airfare from Chicago for $284.
I priced the train costs at about $530 for all 4 of us using railsaver.com. I have priced a car rental which we would get on leaving Rome & turn in on arriving back in Rome at about the same price. I know that we would have to pay for parking, but I thought with the limited time we have that the car would cut down on the transit time.
Does anyone have any feedback on this.
Thanks
Jim L.

Hi Jim,

If the car is large enough, yu won't have to haul luggage on and off the trains.

You will have to haul your luggage from the parking lot in Venice to your hotel and back.

The same might be true in Florence and CT.

Do you have a good navigator with you?

As an aside, May I suggest that you are spending a lot of time packing and unpacking?

Ira
Thanks for the response. We were originally going to go for 10 days. We do not think our daughters are likely to get back there on their own, so we are skimming through italy.
Jim L.

If you are going to concentrate on the large cities, I would suggest the train, particularly in the case of Venice, where you can't take the car into the city anyway. As for transit time, a car can't match the hour and 36 minutes in which the Eurostar covers the 200 miles from Rome to Florence.

Instead of staying one night in Rome at the start of your trip and three more at the end, I would suggest going straight to Florence the first day and adding a fourth night to Rome at the end. This saves one move in and out of a hotel.

Hi Jim,

Your daughters will get back to Italy, whether on their own or with someone else. (It is to be hoped they will be safely married.)

May I suggest that you skip CT for this short trip, and add the night to Florence?

We also went directly to Florence from Rome. It is not at all bad. We were scheduled to arrive at 8:00 AM and had reservations on the 12:30 train. We were able to have lunch at the train station and arrived in Florence in a good mood.

Whatever you do, enjoy your trip.

Good advice:

Instead of staying one night in Rome at the start of your trip and three more at the end, I would suggest going straight to Florence the first day and adding a fourth night to Rome at the end. This saves one move in and out of a hotel.

This suggestion from the poster above is good. You have a lot of packing, unpacking planned. Then you have to watch the train schedule and be there on time to not miss the train.

We always use a car in Europe, except in the large cities like Rome. You do not want a car in Rome.

In Venice you park at the Tronchetta (sp) and take the vaporetto to your hotel stop. Reverse when you leave.

Italy is great for stopping in the small towns and exploring on your own. You lose this on a train. The driving is not much worse than the US. Florence can be tight on parking, but you can find a spot.

Why not arrive Rome, train immediately to Florence then get the car there to drive to Venice and then to Cinque Terre and turn in back in Rome? Use the subway and cabs in Rome...no car needed.

Your daughters will return to Italy. Everyone returns to Italy.

If you want to see things between the major cities by all means rent a car. You don't have to haul things to/from the hotel - except in Venice - simply pull up in front of the hotel to load or unload the car (on the sidewalk if necessary - this is acceptble in Italy) and then go put the car in a garage. If you are doing only the cities and won;t go outside - and you can each move his/her own luggage easily then the train might be just as convenient. (There's nothing worse then one man trying to maneuver 4 people's luggage on and off a train - its not only very stressful but can easily lead to a sprain or strain.)

If you go for a car be sure that its one that will hold four adults plus luggage (for some reason cars in europe seem to have extra tiny trunks that have trouble holding anything bigger than a 25" bag - although they will hold several of those.) (My own sub- compact hatchback holds more than a lot of european full size cars.)

I always look for reasons to recommend the use of a car, and I can barely find one in this itinerary, assuming that you intend to stick with it. I, too would recommend taking the train directly to Florence upon arrival. A full day upon trans-atlantic arrival in Rome is a recipe for hating Rome - - and the 95 minue train ride is just the rght length for the poor nights sleep you will have had while flying.

I, too, would drop the Cinque Terre. Too far out of the way. I would add it to Rome, or if you want a taste of a smaller town, consider Verona, Bologna or Orvieto.

It is irrelevant that your daughters may not get back in a month, a year or a decade. They won't see Pompeii or Sicily or Bellagio or Siena or Milan or Sirmione this trip either. That doesn't dtract from what they will see. Being in a car for five hours to get to five daylight hours in the CT - - and then four-five the next day to get to Rome is no bargain.

Best wishes,

Rex

Oh, and I meant to add: A+ gold-star for such a well-formulated question with all the necessary contextual info.

Thanks alot for the excellent responses. I like the idea about going to Florence the 1st night.
Jim L.

I agree that you should go straight to Florence the first night. I also would say skip the Cinque Terra. With only one night, you don't have time to do the walk through the five villages and to me that's the whole point of going there. And I also feel you don't need a car. A car would be great for traveling through the countryside, but you won't have time to stop as your limited time in the major cities requires all your time there. Don't forget cost of fuel (about $5.00 a gallon) and cost of tolls as well.

I, too suggest dropping Cinque Terre. You could pick up a car at the airport in Rome, drive to Florence (stop in Orvietto on your way!) so that you get two nights in Florence. Drive to Venice where you may even want to drop the car for good. Train to Rome. You will get a chance to drive through some lovely countryside and a feel for some of the towns and countryside. (It's really easy driving in Italy.) BUT you also get the neat experience of train travel between Venice and Rome (nice memory bank stuff for your daughters...they will get back, somehow, sometime). You can probably arrange a daytrip from Rome to visit Pompeii -- but I'm sure there will be plenty to keep you all entertained in Rome. What a lovely trip!

A rental car would be insane for your trip.

$530 is probably going to get you a tiny car that will be very cramped for 4 people. You also haven't figured the real cost: gas is $4/gallon and autostrada tolls are astronomical, parking and there is a small daily road feed.

Even at the same price, the train is a far better choice.

2. Despite what people will tell you, driving in Italy is not the same as in the US. This the Big Lie that you see repeated over and over again in travel discussions. Driving in Europe can easily become a complete nightmare. Signs and directions are invisible or nonexistent, drivers are crazy, the road as a maze of one way streets, and asking for directions is hopeless unless you know the language far better than standard tourist talk. In contrast, you sit on the train and relax, have drink with no worries about accidents, getting lost.

3. You are going to big cities with excellent train connections and where a car is useless. Unless you are touring the countryside, etc. a car makes no sense. Even then, it is of marginal utility.

I cringe to read the negatives in the post above by Platzer. Thers is no "Big Lie" in the joys of driving through Europe.

I stick by recommendation for trains on this itinerary of "the big three" in Italy. You're probably just going to miss out on the joys of the road in Italy - - but that's okay, since there is no argument that Rome, Florence and Venice are superbly connected by train.

Platzer - I'm not sure what europe you're driving in - but based on my personal experience - at least 25 car trips in europe - your statements are not correct.

Signs and directions in europe are at least as good as they are in the US.

Drivers are better on the whole - driving tests are real (not just can you start the car and parallel park) and overall drivers seem much more skilfull. (Although I imagine that the people who really don;t know how to drive - and can barely control their cars on interstates with massively wide lanes and no other traffic - will have trouble in europe. but should they really be behind the wheel at all?)

Yes, there are one-way streets in europe. I don;t know where you're from, but where I live almost all the streets are one-way - why is this a problem? Just print out a mappy page and you can have directions to your hotel/garage - or to the highway.

And to ask for directions all you really ned to know are a couple of numbers and the words for left and right - if the person heloing doesn;t speak engish - which I have found to be very rare.

Just becasue you don;t enjoy driving don;t perpetrate these falsehoods on those who might enjoy a road trip.