By

When I get back I’ll post more about how to prepare for a trip like this, and all the lessons I learned, but for now: a quick note on one specific thing that took me hours to figure out and really bothers me.

The main Italian website for buying in-country trains is http://www.ferroviedellostato.it. What they don’t tell you is that despite the decent English interface, when you get to the part where you actually try to pay for a ticket, all of your cards will be declined. This isn’t because anything is actually wrong with your cards or the information you entered. It just appears that they don’t accept US credit cards. The most upsetting part is just that if their error message said, “Sorry, we don’t accept US credit cards” instead of “The payment is denied” it would have saved me hours.

The preferred solution, it turns out, is for North American customers to use http://italiarail.com. However, every single time I’ve tried to book a train on this site in the past two weeks it gives me the same error: “We are experiencing technical difficulties processing your request. Please try again later.”

I’ll just have to buy the ticket when I get there. Lame.