Wanted to see if any of you could offer advice on part 2 of our honeymoon. After spending our 1st 3 days in Cinque Terre, we have reserved a week stay at Podere Le Manzinaie, right outside Montepulciano.

Our stay begins on a Saturday, and so we will be leaving Cinque early on Saturday by train to get to a town in Tuscany to rent a car. It seems like most rental car spots close by 13:00 on Saturdays, so we need to have a plan that gets us to a rental car agency with plenty of time.

My initial thought, since the farmhouse is 2 km from Montepulciano Stazione and 19 km from Chiusi-Chianciano T. Station was to try to train to either of these places and then try to find a rental car in one of these places. On Autoeurope, it looks like they do rent in Chiusi, but they close at 13:00 on Saturdays. With what looks like a train ride of in excess of 4 hours, arriving by 13:00 will be tough.

Does anyone have any suggestions as to a closer (to Cinque Terre) city/town to rent the car? It doesn't seem like you get penalized too much for dropping in a separate location, so we could easily drop the car in Chiusi on our way out of Tuscany (our next stop after Tuscany is Rome, which is why we would not like to have to back track to return the car). This option will also allow us to be on a shorter length train ride and see some of the trip from our car as opposed to the train. We would also prefer to not have to pick up the car in too big of a city, so as to avoid any city driving.

Thanks for any help.
-Sean

What about Pisa or Florence, maybe even the Florence airport so you wouldn't have to go into the city? I'm kind of in the same (reverse) boat, picking up a car on Saturday and driving to Tuscany. I was concerned that I wouldn't make it in time to pick up car in Orvieto or Chiusi so current plan is to pick up car in Rome on the way out of town.

Good idea Louisa.
Thanks.

up

La Spezia or Pisa--both are easy access by train. Avoid the Pisa airport location because of extra surchages.

Thanks bob. So if we did La Spezia, we would basically just do the entire drive ourselves, no real train ride. That's an option. Yes, and I read 14% charge for airport pickup!

If you really want to have a part of the trip on the train, I suggest Pisa. But I really really think that since you will probably have to change trains in La Spezia anyway (unless you are staying in Monterosso which has some direct trains to Pisa), why not just get the car there?

Have you checked the train times to your various choices on Trenitalia.com? If not, you could play with various towns for the most direct route, but I still think train to La Spezia and drive to Montepulciano would be best.

You could stop somewhere interesting for lunch. You can map the route on Mappy.com or viamichelin.com