We are traveling by train from Milan to Lucca, on to Cinque Terre and back to Milan. We want to plan these travel days prior to arriving in Milan. Could anyone suggest to best website for obtaining the trains schedules and pricing without actually booking the trains.

www.trenitalia.com the Italian State Railways official site.

Thank you for your reply. My problem is I do not know Italian and therefore cannot read this site. I did not see a conversion to English on the site either.

OK i'm not too familiar with the trenitalia site because i always use the www.bahn.de German rail site which has schedules for all of Europe and to me is the easiest to use. It will not have prices as the more fickle trenitalia.com will. An easy way to get to the English schedule page of the bahn.de site: go to www.budgeteuropetravel.com and on the home page click on the link All European Railway Timetables and up pops the English schedule page where you just put in the date and in the two boxes say Milan and Lucca and you'll get all the rail connections for that day. Then click on details for the above after the schedules pop up and you'll get a break down of the places to change, if they are direct and whether reservations are compulsory or not. Bahn site is Wunderbar. The home page i referenced gives you several tips to fully use it.

Appears they've made some adjustments in the website; unfortunately, I couldn't find the 'English' link on the main home page. So to get to the English version, try this . . . .
http://www.trenitalia.com/en/index.html

Thank you again for your reply. As I searched both sites suggested I'm finding there may not be a train to Lucca on our travel date. I may be better served by calling budgeteuropetravel.
Any other input would be greatly appreciated. For example: is it better to buy passes prior to leaving for the Italy?

there HAS to be a train everyday in fact many to Lucca. But from Milan none direct - Milan to Bologna, switch to train to Pistoia, change there for Lucca - trains about hourly everyday on all links.

What day are you going and between which places Milan-Lucca and Lucca-5 Terre?

From Lucca you take a train to Pisa and then train to La Spezia, then milk trains to all the 5 Lands. Again hourly about all links everyday.

But no direct trains on any route.

hi, nld,

if you google trenitalia you'll come up with the international site, which is in english.



regards, ann

hi, again,

I just found trains about every hour from Milan to Lucca via florence, for june.

might be problem if arriving on a sunday - how about a day in Milan or a stop-over in Florence?

regards, ann

there is regular Sunday service on the Florence-Pistoia-Lucca-Pisa train line.

Thank you for your great information.
Traveling by train seems to be the easiest, cheapest and fastest way to travel, esp. in Italy. With trains running every hour we won't have to wait long.
I did call the 800 number on this site trenitalia.com. The man was very helpful and did suggest I look at the German site bahn.de as suggested by Q. Q, you seem to be in the know when it comes to traveling.

nid - thanks - i've been traveling on trains in Europe annually since 1969 so should know something! I wrote a magazine on European budget travel (Palenque Traveller) specializing in rail travel for 20 years. So it's all osmosis. thanks.

http://www.raileurope.com/us/rail/fa...ules/index.htm

This is the best site I've found for Italy train schedule in English.

Ann, are you pretending to be Ira?

(The lightbulb thing....)

Ah when Ira's gone, the cats will...

not deliberately.

imitation?

regards, ann

_

Ann - i'm sure Poohgirl was just jesting as i was. I would have used a light bulb at times but it's too much effort to learn how to do it.

I'm not sure it was Ira's 'bright idea' or not anyway. And i'm sure, being green oriented as he must be he'll be changing to a low-energy fluorescent bulb soon to help save the planet.

hi, palQ

Ironically it was Ira who taught me how to do the



but I can't find the thread where he gives the link to the download.

try www.fodors.com/forums/smileys

regards, ann