Rome to Venice
The Italian High-Speed Spine

Roma Termini is one of Europe's largest railway stations - a vast Mussolini-era structure that was completed in 1950 and has aged into something genuinely grand. The departure hall is 280 metres long, flooded with natural light through a curved glass roof, and connected by underground passages to Rome's metro network. You arrive from the city centre and walk directly to the Frecciarossa platforms without touching a taxi or a transfer.

The Frecciarossa - literally "red arrow" - is Trenitalia's flagship. The FS ETR1000 operates at up to 300 km/h on Italy's high-speed network. On the Rome–Venice route, average commercial speed is around 140 km/h as the train navigates the Apennines, but the service compensates with comfort: wide seats, generous legroom, a full bistrot car, and power sockets at every seat.

The Frecciarossa arrives at Venice's islands, not at an airport 12 kilometres across the lagoon.

Around 90 minutes from Rome, the train calls at Firenze Santa Maria Novella - Florence's central station, a masterpiece of Italian Rationalist architecture completed in 1935 by Giovanni Michelucci. The station sits a ten-minute walk from the Duomo, and most Rome–Venice services stop here for two to three minutes.

This is the halfway mark of the Italian High-Speed Spine. South of Florence the line climbs through the Apennines - a stretch of tunnels and viaducts that hides the engineering achievement of cutting high-speed rail through mountain terrain. North of Florence the train emerges into the Po Valley, and the landscape opens dramatically: flat, misty, agricultural plains stretching to distant Alps.

The Po Valley is one of those landscapes that reads differently from a train than from a car - the scale and flatness of it, the straight lines of the rivers, the poplars, the fog that sits above the fields in winter. Bologna Centrale, another brief stop, marks the Po Valley in its fullness. Then Padova, the medieval university city, 30 minutes from Venice.

North of Florence the world flattens into the Po Valley - Italy's great agricultural plain - and Venice is close.

The approach to Venice is one of the great arrivals in European rail travel. The train crosses the Ponte della Libertà - the four-kilometre causeway that connects the mainland to the Venetian islands - at reduced speed, and through the carriage window the lagoon appears on both sides simultaneously. There is no equivalent experience in flying.

Venezia Santa Lucia station was completed in 1934 and sits at the western end of the Grand Canal. Step off the train, walk through the station doors, and the Grand Canal is directly in front of you. Gondolas, vaporetti, and private water taxis pass twenty metres from the station's steps. You are already in Venice, on the islands, without any secondary transfer.

Stay on the islands - Cannaregio, Dorsoduro, San Polo, or Castello. Hotels on the Venetian Lagoon mainland (Mestre) are cheaper but remove you from the city entirely. The train makes island hotels accessible to any budget by eliminating the most expensive part of the flight journey: the water taxi from Marco Polo.