Bologna to Florence by Train: When You Book Decides Which Train to Take

Four of the pages Google puts on the first page for this route give you a number of trains per day. They are 59, 52, 32 and, from the fourth, no number at all. Three give you a cheapest fare: 9.90 euros, 14 euros and 11.83 dollars. Every one of those pages is selling you a ticket.

So we counted them ourselves, on Trenitalia’s own booking system, every departure across a whole midweek day. And the thing that came out of it is not the number of trains or the cheapest fare. It is that the right train to take depends on when you are reading this, and none of those pages says so.

Nobody agrees how many trains there are

Here is what we found on Trenitalia, sweeping the whole operating day for Wednesday 14 October and de-duplicating by departure time and train number: 70 services, of which 49 are direct.

That last sentence in the caption matters, and it is why we are not going to give you a single total for the day. We counted 49 direct Trenitalia services. Italo says on its own route page that it runs 32 trains a day here. That is their figure, not ours, because Italo does not appear in Trenitalia’s search and we did not count them independently. Add the two and you are somewhere above eighty, which is more than any of the numbers on the first page of Google.

What we can say with confidence is the shape of it: this is one of the best-served short routes in Italy, the fast ones all take 37 or 38 minutes, and you will never be waiting long.

When you book decides which train to take

This is the part that changes what you should do, and we have not seen it anywhere else. We took the same mid-morning departure window and asked Trenitalia for it at seven different booking horizons, from tomorrow to two months out.

Read the last column. Two months out, the hour you save costs 1.90 euros. Nobody sane takes the slow train for that. The day before, the same hour costs 23.00 euros. Now it is a real decision, and for two people it is a 46 euro decision.

The practical rule that falls out of it: if you are booking more than a month ahead, book the fast train and stop thinking about it. If you are booking this week, price the regional before you assume the Frecciarossa is the answer.

This is the opposite of the pattern we measured on the Rome route, where the fare drops sharply and then flattens about a fortnight out and there is no point booking earlier. Here it kept falling all the way to sixty days. The working for Rome is in our guide to getting from Rome to Florence.

The museum punishes late booking far harder than the train

If you are coming from Bologna for the day, the same rule applies to what you do when you arrive, and it applies much more brutally. Book the train late and it costs you 23 euros. Book the Accademia late and there may be nothing to book at all.

That is not a guess. For our guide to Accademia tickets we counted every bookable slot on the official channel and found 23 consecutive days with nothing on sale. If you live in Florence that is an inconvenience. If you have come from Bologna on a 37 minute train and go home tonight, it is the whole day.

So the order is: try the official site first, where the ticket is 20 euros, and only if it is empty for your date pay a reseller who holds an allocation. Below is the one we would take in that situation, and we are telling you to try the cheaper official route first even though we earn nothing when you do.

If the official site is empty for your date

Florence Accademia Gallery Tour & Timed Entry Tickets Included

★★★★★★★★★★4.8 · 3,267 reviews

Sixty-five minutes with a guide and a timed entry slot, for 37 euros against the official 20. You are paying 17 euros for a guide and for the ticket existing at all, which on the 23 days we counted it did not. Best evidenced of the Accademia options we compared: 3,267 ratings at 4.85.

from 37 €

per adult · 65 minutes · official ticket is 20 € when available · free cancellation

Check availability→

The Uffizi behaves differently and is worth knowing about if that is the one you want: there, buying on the day is actually cheaper than booking ahead, which is the opposite of everything else in this paragraph. The figures are in our Uffizi guide.

The same 37 minutes costs 11.90 or 35.00

Within a single day, the 45 Frecciarossa services we counted ranged from 11.90 to 35.00 euros. Every one of them takes 37 or 38 minutes. Same train type, same track, same journey, nearly three times the price.

So there is a second decision hiding behind the first one. Even once you have decided to take the fast train, the departure you pick matters as much as the day you book. On the day we looked, the cheapest and the dearest Frecciarossa were four hours apart.

The lesson is the same one as everywhere else on this site: look at the whole day before you buy, not the first result. The booking engine sorts by departure time, not by price.

The slow train never changes price

The regional fare was 10.00 euros at every single horizon we tested, from tomorrow to two months away. That is not a coincidence, it is how Italian regional fares work: they are set by distance and sold at a fixed price, so there is no booking window to time and no advantage whatsoever in buying early.

Two things follow. You can decide on the morning itself without paying for the privilege. And if your plans are not firm, the regional is the one that does not punish you for it.

One genuine oddity from the same sweep, and it is the best value on the route if the timing suits you: a single Intercity service at 9.90 euros that does the journey in 1 hour 16. Cheaper than the regional and twenty minutes quicker. There was exactly one, and it left at 20:06.

Is it scenic? Almost the whole fast line is tunnel

Google’s own People Also Ask for this route includes “is the train from Bologna to Florence scenic”, and none of the ticket sellers answers it. Italo’s own page promises “scenic views along the route”.

Here is what we can tell you and what we cannot. Wikipedia states that the high-speed line that opened in 2009 contains 73.8 kilometres of tunnel in its 78.5 kilometre length, which is about 94 per cent. That is Wikipedia’s figure, not ours, and we have not verified it against the infrastructure operator, so treat it as strong indication rather than proof.

What is ours: the journey takes 37 minutes for a city pair the regional trains need an hour and a half to cross, and the fast platforms at Bologna Centrale, in the photograph at the top of this page, are underground. Both are consistent with a line that spends almost all of its length inside a mountain.

We are not going to tell you which line the regional trains use, because we have not checked. What we can say is that they take between 1 hour 35 and 1 hour 53 for the same two stations, which is a great deal longer than 37 minutes, and that they cost 10 euros. If the view is what you are after, that is where to spend the hour.

Flying into Bologna: what the airport adds

A lot of people reading this are not in Bologna. They have found a cheap flight into Bologna and are working out whether it is a sensible way to reach Tuscany. So here is the missing half of the arithmetic, from the operator’s own site.

Bologna airport is joined to Bologna Centrale by the Marconi Express, a dedicated monorail. It takes seven minutes, runs up to eight times an hour, and operates from 05:40 to midnight. A single is 12.80 euros and a return is 23.30.

Three details worth having before you land. Between midnight and 05:40 the monorail does not run and the Q bus operated by Tper covers the gap, with Marconi Express tickets valid on it, which is the sort of thing you want to know at one in the morning rather than discover. A family ticket covering up to two adults and three children aged 5 to 16 is 25.60 euros one way, which is cheaper than two adult singles. And groups of ten or more pay 10.50 each.

Twelve euros eighty for seven minutes is a lot. It is also unavoidable, and the real question is what it does to the comparison between airports.

Bologna, Pisa or Florence airport

We have now measured all three arrival routes into Florence, each from the operator that charges for it. This is the table we could not build until today.

Bologna is the dearest way into Florence of the three, by some distance. It costs roughly half as much again as Pisa and more than ten times the Florence airport tram. That does not make it a bad idea, because a cheap enough flight swallows a fifteen euro difference without noticing. It does mean that when you compare flight prices, you should add about 23 euros per person to the Bologna option and about 16 to the Pisa one before you decide.

On speed the picture is different and Bologna does better. The train leg is 37 minutes against Pisa’s hour or so, so once you are moving you are in Florence faster. What we have not measured, and therefore do not quote, is how long you actually spend changing at Bologna Centrale, which is a far bigger station than Pisa Centrale.

The full Pisa arithmetic, including the finding that the through ticket costs exactly the shuttle plus the train and not a cent more, is in our guide to getting from Pisa airport to Florence. And which of the three Florence stations your train actually uses, which matters more than people think, is in our guide to Florence train stations.

Italo, and the 91 km that is also 81 km

Italo runs this route alongside Trenitalia and we should say plainly what we did and did not do: we counted Trenitalia’s services ourselves and we read Italo’s from its own published page. Their figures are 32 trains a day, 37 minutes, non-stop, from 9.90 euros, Bologna Centrale to Firenze Santa Maria Novella.

One thing did catch our eye while reading it. The summary table at the top of Italo’s own route page gives the distance as 91 km. The frequently asked questions further down the same page say “the direct distance between Bologna and Florence is 81 km”. Both numbers are on one page, ten euros of ticket apart from each other in significance but a useful reminder of how much care goes into the copy on a booking site.

For what it is worth, neither number changes anything for you. We mention it because this is a site that checks figures, and when the company selling the ticket cannot agree with itself about how long its own line is, it tells you something about where else its numbers come from.

The practical advice is the same for both operators: compare them for your actual departure, because the spread within a single day is bigger than the spread between the two companies.

One last thing about what is and is not on this page. There is no tour for this train journey here, and that is deliberate: the three Bologna departures we found cost 235, 540 and 674 euros, and the first two have no reviews at all, for a journey you can do yourself for between 9.90 and 11.90. Recommending any of them would be the opposite of everything above. The one card on this page is the Accademia, it is further up, and the paragraph above it tells you to try the official 20 euro ticket first, which earns us nothing.

Once you are in Florence, what to do first and what to book before you fly is in our guides to things to do in Florence and Florence tickets. If Bologna is the trip and Florence is the day out, the reverse journey and the other towns on the same ticket are in day trips from Florence.

Questions

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