Malpensa to Florence by Train: No Direct Service, and the Fastest Route Costs 22 Euros More

Nobody agrees on how long this takes. ItaliaRail says 2 hours 46 minutes and counts 33 trains a day. Trainline says 3 hours 56 minutes and counts 50. Rome2Rio says 3h 21 and between 35 and 100 euros. The Rick Steves forum says a bit over three hours. Google’s own AI Overview says about three hours, and puts the fastest combination at 2h 53.

None of them mentions the thing that actually matters, which is that there is no train from Malpensa to Florence. Not one. We counted every itinerary Trenitalia sells for a midweek day, the same way we did for the Milan route and the Pisa one, and cross-checked against Italo’s own published page.

Every itinerary, counted, and none of them direct

Sixty-three distinct itineraries on one Wednesday, and zero of them run direct. Fifteen involve one change, thirty involve two, seventeen involve three, and one manages four.

That is the single most useful fact about this journey and it is missing from all ten results currently ranking for it. Compare it with the routes we have already counted: Rome to Florence runs 65 services with 54 direct, Milan to Florence runs 52 with 18, Pisa to Florence runs 57 with 55. Malpensa runs 63 with none.

The spread is wide too. The quickest is 3h 14 and the slowest on sale that day was 7 hours 48 minutes. Fares ran from 30.90 to 84.90 euros.

The fastest route is the one to avoid

Here is the part worth the page. Sort the results by journey time, which is what everybody does, and you get twelve itineraries at 3 hours 14 minutes. Every single one of those twelve contains a leg that the price excludes.

Trenitalia labels it plainly in the itinerary: Urban transport (not included in the price). So the 58.90 euros buys you the train before it and the train after it, and you are still to pay for the bit in the middle. It is disclosed, it is not a scam, and it is very easy to miss when you are comparing numbers on a screen.

Now put the alternative next to it.

Two minutes. That is what the fastest itinerary buys you, and it costs 22 euros, an extra change and a fare that does not cover the whole trip. We are not going to guess why the booking system surfaces it first, because we do not know. We can only tell you to read the itinerary rather than the journey time.

Italo sells a Malpensa to Florence that is two tickets

Italo publishes a route page headed Train from Malpensa to Florence with fares from 32.90 euros, and it ranks on page one for this search. It is easy to read that as a through train. It is not one.

Italo’s own stops table, on that page, breaks the route into two rows: the malpensa to milano leg is a Regional Train, and the milano to firenze leg is the Italo High Speed Train. The page says so in words as well, describing it as the new combination Italo High-Speed Train plus Trenitalia regional train.

So it is a bundle, and that is not a criticism. At 32.90 euros with the regional leg included it looked better value than the 58.90 Trenitalia quoted us for the same day with a leg left out. The honest caveat: 32.90 is a lead-in fare on Italo’s own marketing page and 58.90 was a dated quote for a specific Wednesday, so those two numbers are not measured the same way and should not be treated as a like-for-like comparison. Check both before you book, which is the same advice the Milan route ends up giving.

The airport leg on its own

The first half of this journey is a genuinely good service, and it is worth separating from the rest. In our sample there were 60 departures from Malpensa Aeroporto to Milano Centrale, 24 of them direct, taking 60 to 69 minutes.

The pattern repeats exactly. The result that looks quickest is the one with the uncosted leg; the honest direct is three minutes behind it for the same money; and four minutes behind that there is an option at 9.40 euros instead of 15.00.

Sixty-two of the 63 full itineraries start with a regional train out of the airport. Exactly one starts with a bus, and we have not verified its operator or fare in a primary source, so we are not covering it here.

What it costs end to end

If you book the two legs yourself and take the sensible options, you are looking at 36.90 euros for the single combined itinerary we would choose, or around 9.40 plus the Milan to Florence fare if you split the tickets.

What the second leg costs is the subject of its own page, and we are not going to repeat it here. The short version: on the same Wednesday, the Frecciarossa from Milano Centrale to Florence ran between 21.90 and 56.90 euros purely depending on the hour you picked, and there is a direct Intercity at 15.90 that no ticket seller mentions.

How far it really is

287 km is the straight line, not the journey. The figure comes from Italo’s own page, where its FAQ states it precisely: “the direct distance between Malpensa and Florence is 287 km”.

Your train does not travel in a straight line. It goes east into Milan first and then south through Bologna, so the distance covered is longer. We flag it because we found the same confusion on the Milan route, where Google’s AI Overview took a straight-line figure off Italo’s page and presented it as the distance of the trip.

One source says 2h46, another says 3h56

ItaliaRail’s 2h 46 is the one to be careful with: it is faster than anything we could find on sale, and it is the figure Google’s summary leans on. Trainline’s 3h 56 is at the other end and closer to a typical itinerary than to a good one. Between those two lies the real answer, which is a shade over three hours if you pick well.

Questions