Can you take a ferry from Italy to Greece? If so what are the locations for boarding? Rough cost? Time it would take? Thanks!

There are ferry lines for sure that run from Brindisi to Greece, also from Bari I believe.

try www.greekferries.gr and
www.ferries.gr for starts

We looked into this when we traveled from Italy to Greece in the summer of 2004. Most ferries leave from Brindisi. We are a family of 4, and we were surprised to find out that buying train tickets from Rome to Brindisi and then overnight ferry tickets to Greece was MORE expensive than buying tickets to fly from Rome to Athens. The travel time saved was great, too, so be sure to look into flying.

There are literally dozens of options from Italy to Greece. The main departure ports in Italy are Ancona, Bari, Brindisi and Venice. In Greece the main destination ports are Corfu (Kerkyra), Igoumenitsa and Patra.

Costs and times vary widely, depending on the route, season and accommodation if it's an overnighter, but start from around €35 and about 7.5 hours from Brindisi to Corfu.

For full details try gtp.gr but summer schedules won't be published until around April.

One word (name) to remember for any question about ferries: YOURA

See http://www.fodors.com/forums/threads...p;tid=34511619

Best wishes,

Rex

Ancona is the port with the best choice of ships, but there are services from Venezia (the most beautiful departure port), Bari (best from southern Italy) and Brindisi (best if you like a long trip on an elderly ferry). These are a few of the many operators:
www.minoan.gr
www.superfast.com
www.anek.gr
www.fragline.gr
www.maritimeway.com

The sites given here by other posters are very useful if you want to spend time going through each individual operator's schedules to find what you're looking for. But for Greece I still prefer GTP, since it instantly gives you the full schedules, including the day of the week and time, for all the companies which run any given route. For example, putting in "Italy" and "Greece" currently comes up with 57 options from a total of 6 different companies.

Thanks for the private e-mail to me, Geoff about youra.com being NOT up to date. I should have known better than to recommend something that I haven't even looked at, in a year or so.

I heard there was a catamaran that traveled between Italy and Corfu in 3 hours. Does anyone know about this?

Last summer, SNAV (www.snav.it) ran a fast catamaran from Brindisi to Kerkira ("Corfu&quot. It's far too early to know what might be running next summer - by the nature of fast craft, their high running costs only allow service in the peak season, and they cannot run reliably in all weather.

Right now a flight from Rome to Athens on Aegean in June 2006, for example, costs 73 Euros one way.