Pisa to Florence by Train: 55 Direct a Day, and Three That Cost More to Go Slower

A lot of people arrive in Tuscany through Pisa rather than Florence, because the flights are cheaper and there are more of them. Then they discover that the airport and the city they actually want are eighty kilometres apart, and that nobody has explained the connection clearly.

So here it is with real numbers. The shuttle prices come from the operator’s own site, where they are buried inside an image rather than written as text, and the train fares from Trenitalia’s booking system.

The three options, compared

The train wins for almost everybody, and the reason is the fourth column rather than the first two. It is the only option that ends in the middle of Florence, at Santa Maria Novella, from which most of the historic centre is a walk.

The train, step by step

It is two vehicles, and knowing that in advance removes most of the confusion.

First the PisaMover. This is an automated shuttle linking the airport to Pisa Centrale station, and it is worth saying clearly that it is not run by Trenitalia, which is why the airport does not appear in Trenitalia’s own journey planner and why people conclude, wrongly, that there is no connection.

Then the train. From Pisa Centrale to Florence Santa Maria Novella we counted 55 direct services across the day, from 9.80 euros, with the fastest taking 52 minutes. The first leaves at 04:15 and the last at 22:30.

That is a lot of trains. On this leg you do not need a plan, you need to walk to the departure board.

The combined ticket saves nothing, and buy it anyway

You can buy the whole journey as a single ticket from the airport to Florence. When we priced it, the best itinerary came out at 16.30 euros and 1h 18.

Now do the addition: 6.50 for the shuttle plus 9.80 for the train is 16.30 exactly. The combined ticket is not a discount, it is the two fares stapled together.

Buy it anyway. Not because it is cheaper, but because it means one purchase instead of two, on a machine, in a language you may not read, with luggage, after a flight. The saving is in attention rather than money, and that is worth more than nothing when you have just landed.

One caveat from the shuttle operator’s own terms: a standalone PisaMover ticket is valid for thirty days, but tickets bought in combination with a rail journey through Trenitalia are excluded from that. Treat the combined ticket as tied to your train.

The tower is closer than Florence is

Worth deciding before you buy anything, because the geography is in your favour and most people find out too late. Piazza dei Miracoli is a short ride from the terminal, and Florence is eighty kilometres away. If you land in the morning, seeing Pisa properly and continuing afterwards costs you an afternoon, not a day, and it saves you the separate trip back out here later in the week.

You do not need a tour to look at the tower from the grass. What a tour buys is the inside of things: the Cathedral and the Baptistery are ticketed, the Camposanto and the two museums are separate tickets again, and climbing the tower itself runs on timed slots that sell out. The timings are the part worth knowing. The English departure starts at 10:00 and its tower slot is 12:00, so a morning arrival works and an afternoon one does not.

For a morning landing

Pisa Highlights: Baptistery, Cathedral and Optional Leaning Tower

★★★★★★★★★★4.7 · 501 reviews

The one we would book if the flight lands early. A licensed guide for the Cathedral and Baptistery, with the Camposanto and both museums included, and the tower climb as an option rather than an obligation. Groups are capped at fifteen. Note that under-eights are not allowed up the tower, and the cathedral has a dress code covering shoulders and knees.

from 42 €

per adult, 1.5 to 2.75 hours, free cancellation up to 24 hours

Check availability→

What we are not recommending: a private transfer from the airport to Florence. They exist, and the two we found were listed at 360 and 397 euros, one with no reviews at all and the other with two. Against a train that runs 55 direct services a day for a fraction of that, there is no argument for it, so we are not going to manufacture one.

Every direct train, and the three to avoid

Whether you have just landed or you have spent the morning at the Leaning Tower, the second half of this journey is the same train, and it is a much better service than most sources suggest. We counted every departure from Pisa Centrale for a midweek day: 57 services, of which 55 run direct.

That answers the question people actually ask, which is how often they go. The median gap between direct trains is 21 minutes. The shortest is four minutes and the longest is 64. So you do not need a timetable for this leg: turn up at Pisa Centrale and you will rarely wait more than half an hour.

But three of those 55 are a trap, and it is a nastier one than the usual slow-train problem, because these ones cost more money to take much longer.

The 08:50, the 12:50 and the 14:50 all take 2 hours 34 minutes and all cost 11.40 euros instead of 9.80. Against the 52 minute service, that is 16 percent more money to spend nearly three times as long on a train.

What makes it a trap rather than a curiosity is the departure time. The 08:50 leaves nineteen minutes before the 09:09 that gets in at 10:01. Take the earlier train and you arrive an hour and twenty-three minutes later, having paid more. If you are standing on the concourse taking the next departure on the board, that is exactly the mistake available to you.

We can tell you the fares and the times because we queried them. We have not established why those services take so long, and we are not going to guess: Italian regional fares are set by distance, so a higher fare on a regional is consistent with a longer route, but we did not verify the route itself. Check the journey time before you buy, not the departure time.

The half hour most people lose

This is the same trap we found on the day trips out of Florence, and it applies in this direction too.

Trenitalia runs two kinds of regional train on this line. The Regionale stops everywhere. The Regionale Veloce does not. Of the 55 direct services we counted, 20 were Regionale Veloce and 35 were Regionale. The fastest did Pisa Centrale to Florence in 52 minutes; the ordinary ones mostly took 1h 14 to 1h 25, for the same 9.80 euros.

Regional fares are set by distance, not by speed, so there is no premium for the fast one. Look at the service type on the board before you board. It is the cheapest half hour you will ever save.

The corollary, and it is the single most useful thing here: do not book this leg in advance. The fare is fixed, so an advance ticket buys you no saving and ties you to a departure you might miss while you are still waiting for a suitcase.

If your flight lands late

This is where the cheap flight stops being cheap, and almost nothing written about Pisa mentions it.

Read those two rows together and the constraint is obvious. The shuttle is not the problem, the train is. The shuttle is still running for an hour and a half after the last train to Florence has gone.

So if you land after about ten at night, you are not getting to Florence by train. Your options become the bus, a taxi across eighty kilometres of motorway, or a night in Pisa and the 04:15 or something civilised in the morning. Of those, a cheap room in Pisa is usually the least bad, and it has the side effect of letting you see the Piazza dei Miracoli at eight in the morning with nobody in it.

Worth checking your arrival time against that 22:30 before you book the flight, not after.

The bus, and where it really drops you

There are direct buses between Pisa airport and Florence, and on price they beat the train: Flibco advertises from 12.90 euros for a journey of about an hour, which is faster than the train door to door and three euros cheaper.

The catch is in the small print of the route. The Florence stop is Via Guidoni 222, which is out by the airport road and not the historic centre, with Santa Maria Novella served only at night. So on a daytime arrival you save three euros and then need a tram or a taxi to finish the journey, which gives the three euros back and costs you the time.

And there is a second operator our earlier version of this page missed entirely. FlixBus runs the same route, and on its own figures that is 19 services a day from 19.69 dollars, about an hour, with the first at 01:00 and the last at 23:59. One cabin bag and one hold bag are included. Its own page quotes 19.69 in one place and 19.66 in another, which tells you how precise to treat a from-price.

The more useful thing FlixBus publishes is that this route has four different stops in Florence, not one. Which one you get depends on the service you book, and the gap between the best and the worst is the difference between arriving at the station and arriving at a motorway car park.

Our read: the bus is the better option late at night, when the train has stopped and the Santa Maria Novella stop is the one in use. During the day, take the train.

From Florence airport, for comparison

To decide between the two airports you need the other half of the sum, so here it is. Florence has its own airport, Amerigo Vespucci, also called Peretola, and getting from it to the centre is a different order of problem.

There is a tram, the T2, which runs from the airport to Piazza San Marco, at the edge of the historic centre, with no changes. The stop is a couple of minutes on foot from the terminal. The fare, from the tram operator’s own price list, is a standard city ticket:

Fourteen euros thirty and an hour of difference. That is the real penalty for flying into Pisa, and it is the number to hold against the fare difference when you are choosing flights.

One warning about the tram that catches people with holiday luggage. Large bags need their own ticket. A bag up to 10 kg and 55 by 40 by 20 centimetres travels free; anything bigger requires an extra ticket, and bags over 80 by 45 by 25 centimetres or 20 kg are not allowed on board at all. For two people with two large suitcases that quietly doubles the fare, and it is still under five euros.

If you are weighing up a cheap flight into Milan Malpensa instead, be warned that it is a much worse arrival than either of these: no train runs from Malpensa to Florence and every itinerary involves at least one change, most of them two or three.

One thing worth knowing before you book the train leg, because it changed a fare for us when we measured it: Florence has three stations, and the trains from Pisa reach two of them. Forty-eight direct services a day go to Rifredi rather than Santa Maria Novella, at the same 9.80 euro fare, and the quickest of them was a minute faster. Which station each service uses is in our guide to Florence train stations.

Pisa or Florence airport

Google asks this in the suggestion box for both airports, so it is worth answering plainly rather than diplomatically.

Fly into Pisa if the fare is more than about fifteen euros a head cheaper, and into Florence if it is not. That is not a rule of thumb, it is the difference between the two transfers worked out in the table above: 16.30 euros against 2.00, and an hour and twenty against twenty minutes. If the Pisa flight saves you eighty euros, take it and stop thinking about it. If it saves you ten, you are paying to spend an extra hour on public transport with your luggage.

The calculation changes in exactly one situation, and it is the one above: a late arrival. A cheap flight that lands at 23:00 in Pisa has no train, and whatever you save on the ticket you spend on a taxi or a hotel you did not plan for.

One more thing worth knowing if Pisa is your entry point: you are already at the start of the coastal line, which makes the Cinque Terre far easier from here than from Florence, and the leaning tower is closer to the airport than Florence is. If your flight lands in the morning, seeing Pisa before continuing costs you very little. We cover what a visit there involves, and what every ticket costs, in our guide to Pisa.

And if you are arriving through Rome instead, the train north is easier than this one: we counted all ninety-seven daily services on that route, where the fast train takes about ninety minutes and, unusually, costs less than the slow one.

Questions