Unlike in Austria and Germany, all Italian express trains are compulsory reservation. So a couple of weeks ago I booked the Bologna-Firenze, Firenze-Roma and Roma-Pisa trains on the Trenitalia website, with "ticketless booking" – I just have to be sure to take the magic codes with me. Conveniently they could all be added to a shopping cart and paid for together, though there is a 15 minute time-out from the start of the first booking so I managed to lose the lot and had to start again, as I was being very careful to double-check my dates and times.
A discount of up to 30% was available on all of them – the reservation still changeable up to 24 hours before departure – since I was more than a month from travelling. The discount means that I have the remarkably fast 1-hour 35-minute Firenze-Roma journey for just €31.00. But I took the regular fare for Bologna-Firenze to give me a bit more flexibility in case of delays early in the Tour: this one is changeable up to half an hour after departure.
The site wouldn't allow me to make a ticketless booking for Lucca-Venezia, presumably because the journey starts with a regional train from Lucca to Firenze. Clearly I should just book Firenze-Venezia now and buy the regional ticket at Lucca, but I'm just pausing for a moment to re-think my train times – principally, do I want to take an hour or so later train out of Lucca to give me a chance of morning photos around the city walls before leaving, as I'll only have had one full day there? In the end I booked the 11:30 Firenze-Venezia, based on leaving Lucca on the 09:32 regional train.
Blogging has been non-existent in the last four weeks, partly because this is the calm period before the storm, partly because my shingles attack seems to have been a pretty severe one and I'm still suffering quite badly – hopefully it will be mostly cleared up before departure.
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