For years, the Frecciarossa was simply the answer. Rome to Florence in an hour and a half, no thinking required, a coffee and a train novel and you’re stepping out into Santa Maria Novella station before you’ve finished either. I recommended it to everyone. I still think it’s the right call for a lot of trips.
But somewhere around my fourth or fifth time doing that route, I started noticing what the train doesn’t give you: everything in between. Orvieto sliding past the window, close enough to see the cathedral facade catching the light, and then gone. Orte’s medieval outline on its hill, visible for maybe eight seconds before the train’s back in a cutting. You get Rome, then — after a very fast, very efficient nothing — you get Florence. The middle of the country doesn’t exist as far as the Frecciarossa is concerned.
The trip I actually remember
The one Rome-to-Florence trip that’s stuck with me wasn’t on a train at all. I’d booked a private driver mostly because I had two extra bags and no patience for hauling them through Termini, and the driver asked, almost as an afterthought, whether I wanted to stop in Orvieto on the way. I said sure, expecting maybe fifteen minutes for a photo.
We ended up spending closer to ninety minutes there. Walked up to the Duomo, which does something with black-and-white stone and gold mosaic that photos genuinely undersell. Went down into the underground tunnels the Etruscans carved into the tufo rock centuries before anyone had heard of Florence. Had a glass of Orvieto Classico standing at a bar the size of a closet, poured by a woman who’d clearly had the same conversation with a hundred travellers before me and still seemed to mean it when she said the 2019 vintage was the good one.
None of that happens on the train. It can’t — there’s no version of “the train stops for ninety minutes so you can look at a well” that exists in any timetable.
The honest trade-off
I’m not going to pretend the private transfer wins on every measure. The train is faster, point to point, and if speed is genuinely all you need, book the train and don’t feel bad about it. The private car takes about three hours door to door on the direct route — closer to four or four and a half with a stop like Orvieto folded in.
What you’re buying with those extra hours is control. Nobody photographs Orte from a Frecciarossa window because there isn’t time to ask the conductor to slow down. In a private car, if you want to pull off for twenty minutes at an autogrill that turns out to have unexpectedly good coffee, you just do. If your flight lands late at Fiumicino and you want a driver to skip the fixed departure time entirely, that option exists too.
Who this is actually for
If you’re travelling with kids, or with more luggage than two hands can manage, or if this is genuinely your one shot at seeing the stretch of Italy between two of its most famous cities, the case for driving instead of training gets a lot stronger. It’s also just a better fit if you’re the kind of traveller who’d rather arrive having seen something than arrive having seen a phone screen for ninety minutes.
I’ve since done the drive twice more, once stopping in Orvieto again (worth repeating) and once skipping straight through when I was short on time — proof that the option, done right, bends to whatever the day actually needs. Both times I went through Transfers Rome, mainly because the price was fixed before I left Rome and nobody tried to upsell me on a bigger car I didn’t need.
The train will always be there for the next trip. This one, I’m glad I didn’t rush.
