Rome Travel Forum

From Rome we are planning a one-day trip to Castel Gondalfo and back and thence to meet our tour group in Florence. What would best way to travel, train or bus? We must arrive at our meeting place hotel at 3 p.m. so we need to know how long a trip it would be. Would it be best to plan to spend the night in rome and leave next morning. We would prefer to do our Castel Gandolfo visit and get to Florence same day. Is this possible? I guess that is 3 questions and I say thank you for answering me and giving me several different ideas.

I am a little confused, but if you mean that you want to visit Castel Gandolfo and then get to Florence by 3pm I don't think this is possible.

You can either get the Metro A to Agnanina and then the blue Cotral bus to Castel Gandolfo, or you can take a train from Termini. Both journeys take a bit less than an hour.

http://www.trenitalia.com/en/index.html

will give you times and fares for trains from Rome to Castel Gandolfo and to Florence (that journey takes just over 1.5 hours).

If you click on 'Roma' on:

http://www.cotralspa.it/scarica_orari_new.asp?Tipo=

and scroll down the PDF timetable to page 64 you will get the times of the Cotral buses from Anagnina.

This answer is: "it depends on what day of the week you are going, but it's probably not very practical anyway."

As J (leics) pointed out, Castel Gandolfo is in the other direction from Florence using Rome as the starting point. Furthermore, Castel Gandolfo is serviced only by local trains, so all rail solutions from Castel Gandolfo to Florence will have to change trains in Roma Termini anyway (adding more delay).

Simply put, when you look at rail solutions at the trenitalia website that J gave you, you will see that it will be nearly 3 hours to get to Florence from Castel Gandolfo in the best of cases. Working backwards from an arrival time in Florence of before 3 p.m., the latest you can leave Castel Gandolfo is 11:26, and arrive in Florence after connecting to a Eurostar at 14:06 (giving you an hour to get to the hotel, which is plenty of time if the hotel is in the city center).

And given that it will take at least 40 minutes to take the train from Termini to Castel Gandolfo in the morning, and given that there aren't that many trains running in that direction at that hour (maybe once an hour if you're lucky), you won't have a lot of time there anyway...maybe if you left on the 07:20 train from Termini and arrived at Castel Gandolfo at 08:01...

Well, you know that the train station isn't in Castel Gandolfo itself, right? Castel Gandolofo is on the lip of the old crater that has the volcanic lake in it, and the train station is part way down the slope to the crater floor. I am sure that you will be able to walk or take a bus (I think) or maybe take the funicular (single person) that was there long ago (i.e., may not still be there, or maybe the funicular was only from crater floor to the town, skipping the station - it was a long time ago), but this is just some added time to your trip.

Now, assuming that you want to try this all in one day, you will (1) have to get from wherever you are in Rome to Termini very early in the morning, (2) drop off your excess luggage at the Left Luggage office, because there surely isn't such a luggage facility at Castel Gandolfo, (3) buy 2 regional tickets (there and back), (4) buy and reserve a seat on the Eurostar that leaves Termini at 12:30 (this train, unlike the regional trains, requires reservations, so there have to be available seats on that train, or else this whole solution is off), (5) validate your first regional ticket, (6) ride to Castel Gandolfo, (7) get up the hill from the station, (8) see whatever it is you're going to see (you'll miss one of the best features of Castel Gandolfo which is lunch at a restaurant overlooking the lake - none of them will be open before you have to leave), (9) get on down the hill back to the station, (10) validate your second regional ticket, (11) take the 11:26 train back to Termini, (12) hope like heck that when you arrive at 12:11 that you will have time to get your luggage out of the Left Luggage office before you have to board the Eurostar at 12:30, (13) ride to Santa Maria Novella, the main station in Florence, (14) schlep yourselves and your luggage to the official taxi queue (ignore any offers in the station itself but go outside to the queue), and (15) take said taxi to the hotel that your group is at, assuming that it's actually in Florence and not in one of the towns nearby (which is common enough for large tours, who can't fit into the city centers because of size or price or whatever)...and you can ONLY do this on a weekday, because the particular train from Castel Gandolfo to Roma Termini that matches with the Eurostar doesn't run on Sunday (I didn't check Saturday)...

Make sense? Try going to Castel Gandolfo the day before, and if nothing else, have a delightful lunch overlooking the lake...

Bill