Arriving at 0815 on a weekday and need to go into Rome to catch a train to Florence.
Lots of questions here:

How long should I expect it to take? I thinking about 2.5 hours or so, maybe three to be on the safe side?

Should/could I buy the tickets (Rome to Florence) at the airport or should I wait until I get to the train station in Rome?

Or should I try to purchase them in advance before I leave the States?

I'm concerned about mising the train for some reason. Would the tickets be worthless or could I use them for the next train?

There is a train from the airport to the Rome Termini station, and from there you can get the train to Florence. If you buy your ticket all the way to Florence at the Rome airport, the agent will know which connection to reserve for you.

Musicteacher, sounds reasonable - guess I'm worrying too much about timing the connection.

There is a train from Fiumicino Airport to Termini Station called the Leonardo Express. It costs about 10E. I think it runs every 30 mins.

Thanks for the info.

Can you make a reservation ahead of time or do you have to purchase in advance to do that? Seems like all the ES trains require a reservation, so is that a couple of euros extra?

No need to purchase Leonardo Express tickets ahead of time. Just get them when you get to the train station, €9.50 per ticket. There will be signs guiding you from the airport.

The Leonardo Express will stop at the far left end of the Termini station, track 24, and leave the airport on I think 7 minutes after the hour and 37 minutes after the hour.

The Leonardo "Express" (9.50 euro) leaves the airport at :05 and :35. I think you have a good chance to catching the 9:05, which will get you to Termini at 9:40. Or the next one, 30 minutes later.

Either way, you can catch the 10:30am train to Florence, arriving 12:06.

But like others say, just get the Rome-Florence ticket at the airport train station.

The price of the ES train includes seat reservations. It's 29.44 Euro, all in, for Rome to Florence.

Appreciate the info. I'll wait until in Rome to purchase the tickets.

Cato, thanks to very detailed directions from Walter at paradiselost we were able to arrive at FCO at 11 am and catch the Rome to Naples Eurostar at 12:45. The information on that thread might help you also. A search here should get it to you.

Another piece of advice was for us to bring a printout of the train schedule with us when we made our reservation with the airport ticketing counter. In your case if you know the train times and numbers Rome to Florence then the agent can just point which trains they recommend. I just wish we had thought ahead to do the same for our return. We would have known how early we had to leave Sorrento to get to Rome through Naples.

thanks to the great directions we received through this forum traveling by train was problem free Have a great trip. Deborah