I just love trains. Not in a Big Bang Theory, Sheldon Cooper kind of way, but I do love the option of taking a train to get from one place to another. There is an ease to it as far as I’m concerned, because I choose my route, get on, and then I don’t have to worry about navigating or traffic, especially in a foreign country. This is part of the reason why we booked train tickets from Florence to Calabria, Italy.

I’ve made this trip a couple of times, and as you’ve already read- I try to learn from my mistakes. The last time I was in Florence in 2016, I didn’t book my train tickets in advance and this caused a bit of a mess. Being that it was so close to Ferragosto (an Italian holiday where everything shuts down- I discuss it here in a previous post) we had an issue getting seats all the way down to Calabria and ended up having to book part of the way on a regional train which is considerably cheaper, but had no assigned seats and apparently they don’t cap the amount of tickets they sell (or if they do, there were hundreds people riding the train without a ticket). We almost didn’t make it on that train because we couldn’t get on it. Talk about stress! We had to literally push our way on to a car and we stood for most of the ride which was close to 6 hours long!

This time, we monitored the Trenitalia site and as soon as tickets were available for purchase, we booked our tickets with reserved seats. The site functions like most American sites- you put in your origin and then your final destination and the site provides you with options to choose. We needed to change trains in Naples so we decided to take the earliest option giving us 15 minutes to walk from one track to another for the second train. This would have been plenty of time, if we had actually arrived on time…

And therein lies the problem. Sometime between when we booked our tickets and our boarding of the first train-the FrecciaRossa (a beautiful high speed train that can travel at almost 190 miles per hour) Trenitalia decided to add some stops which put us in to Naples 15 minutes later than the original arrival time. I know you’re doing the math right now and you’re realizing that our second train would be pulling away just as we were arriving. And that is exactly what happened. You would think in this day and age that the company would have sent us an email letting us know about the change. I mean, there should be some sort of automated system that tells them who is booked on what train, right? Apparently not. We received no email, no phone call, and not even a notification on their app.

Our second train, the Frecciargento would have put us to our desired destination at 12:30 pm, an optimal time for one of my family members to pick us up, but as we spoke to the conductor, she assured us that we would not make it. She called ahead for us and let them know we would need to change our tickets. When we arrived in Naples, we watched our second train pull away and made our way to customer service to change our tickets. Thankfully, we were able to get seats on a later train, the Frecciabianca. The difference between these trains seems to be the routes and the amount of stops. The customer service representative at the train station was not surprised that we didn’t get a notification and she told us this kind of thing happens all the time. We happened to be lucky that they had seats remaining in first class (which our original tickets were) and they made the change at no charge. Note to self- leave myself more time in between next time.

We left an hour later, but because this train had more scheduled stops, we didn’t arrive to our destination until almost 4 pm. However, minus the slight mishap, the train experience was quite nice. All three of the trains I’ve mentioned can travel at high speeds and are equipped with a food/beverage car and clean (airplane like) lavatories. As luck would have it, we traveled on both trains with a very interesting woman and her dog. Part of what I love about traveling is meeting interesting people so I enjoyed chatting with her and petting Chico (definitely not the Italian spelling of the dog’s name).

From her, I learned that Italy is very dog friendly and after this conversation I did pay attention to just how many people brought their dogs around with them. It seems that she was correct, because throughout the rest of the trip, I noticed dogs everywhere- in food stores, on the ferry, at the car rental place, etc…

A few hours and a trip to the beverage cart later, we arrived at our final destination- late, but only a little worse for the wear. We said goodbye to our new friends and embarked on to the next phase or our trip.

Do you have a train story you’d like to share? I’d love to hear it! Please like and share…