Picking a Base Town for a Week of Day Trips by Train

Packing up every second morning is the quiet tax on a lot of trips. You check out at ten, drag a bag to the station, arrive somewhere new at two, spend an hour finding the flat and the supermarket, and by the time you actually look around, half the day is gone. Do that four times in a week and you have lost the equivalent of two full days to logistics.

The fix I keep coming back to is the base town: one place to sleep for five to seven nights, with a handful of day trips by train fanning out from it. It sounds obvious, but the whole thing lives or dies on which town you pick, and the obvious choice is usually the wrong one. Here is how I choose, with two real examples I have used and would use again.

The famous city is rarely the best base

The instinct is to sleep in the place with the biggest name and day-trip to the smaller ones. In northern Italy that means staying in Florence. In Kansai it means Kyoto. Both are wonderful to visit, and both are, in my experience, poor bases.

The reasons are practical. Rooms in the famous city cost noticeably more for the same quality. The station is often a long way from the old centre, or the centre is so crowded that getting back to your room after dinner is its own small ordeal. And the famous city tends to sit at the end of the rail lines rather than in the middle of them, so every day trip starts with a longer ride.

A better base is usually a slightly less famous town at a junction. You visit the famous city as a day trip, and you sleep somewhere cheaper, calmer and more central to everything else.

Two bases I would pick again

Bologna, for Emilia-Romagna and Tuscany

Bologna Centrale is one of the busiest junctions in Italy, and almost everything worth seeing in the region is within about an hour of it. These are the rough one-way times I have worked with, using regional trains unless noted:

• Modena, about 25 to 30 minutes. Good for a lunch-focused day and the cathedral.
• Ferrara, about 30 minutes. Flat, quiet, and the walls are made for cycling.
• Parma, roughly 50 to 60 minutes on a regional, faster on a high-speed train.
• Ravenna, a little over an hour. The mosaics are the reason to go.
• Florence, around 35 to 40 minutes on a high-speed train, which is the trick that makes Bologna work as a base for Tuscany too.

Hotels in Bologna also tend to run cheaper than equivalent rooms in Florence, though I would check your own dates rather than trust that blindly.

Osaka, for Kyoto, Nara and Kobe

The same logic in Japan. Kyoto is the name everyone wants, but Osaka is the junction. The JR special rapid to Kyoto takes about half an hour. Nara is around 40 minutes from Osaka-Namba on the Kintetsu line, and Kobe's Sannomiya station is roughly 20 minutes the other way. Evenings in Osaka are livelier, food is cheaper, and you are not fighting tour groups to get back to your hotel at night.

How I test a candidate base

When I am considering a town I do not know, I run it through five checks before booking anything. They take about an hour with a timetable website and a map.

1. The 90-minute ceiling. List the places you want to see and look up the one-way train time from the candidate town. Anything over 90 minutes makes a poor day trip, because three hours of round-trip travel eats too much of a day. If more than one of your must-sees breaks the ceiling, it is the wrong base.
2. Walk time to the station. Find accommodation within a ten-minute walk of the main station. A base that needs a bus or a taxi to the train adds 20 to 30 minutes to every single day, and it adds up fast.
3. The last train back. Check the final departure from each day-trip town back to your base, on the actual weekday you plan to go. Some smaller lines stop surprisingly early, and Sunday timetables are often thinner.
4. Closing days. Plenty of museums in Italy close on Mondays. Match day trips to the days things are actually open, and keep the base town itself for the closing day, since you can wander there without a plan.
5. One reason to stay in. The base needs to be somewhere you enjoy on a rest day. If the only thing in town is the station, you will feel stuck the moment it rains.

That last test matters more than it looks. On a seven-night stay, I plan four or five day trips at most and leave the rest open. If you want more on building slack into a longer trip, our piece on building rest days into a long trip goes into it.

Where base towns go wrong

I have made most of these mistakes myself, so take them as confessions rather than warnings.

The first was choosing a base for its own charm without checking connections. I once booked a week in a lovely hill town in Umbria that turned out to have a station 4 kilometres below the old centre, served by a bus that stopped running at 8 in the evening. Every day trip became a negotiation with the bus timetable. Beautiful place, terrible base.

The second is overloading the week. Having everything within an hour is tempting, and it is easy to plan a trip for every single day. By day five you are tired of trains, and the last two trips blur together. Fewer, better days beat a full schedule.

The third is forgetting that the base town is also a destination. People sometimes spend a week in Bologna and see almost nothing of Bologna, because they leave every morning and come back too tired to explore. Give it at least one full day of its own. Smaller cities often reward that more than the famous ones do, which is part of the argument in our look at second cities worth visiting.

A base town is not a place you happen to sleep. It is a place you come home to every evening, so it has to be somewhere you like coming home to.

Rail passes and tickets

I will be careful here, because prices and pass rules change often and I do not want to quote numbers that are out of date by the time you read this. The general pattern I have seen is that regional trains in Italy are cheap enough that buying point-to-point tickets on the day is usually fine. High-speed tickets reward booking a few days ahead. In Kansai, regional passes and IC cards are worth comparing against single fares for your actual route list, but whether a pass pays off depends entirely on how many trips you take. Do the sum with your own itinerary rather than assuming a pass is the better deal.

Whatever you buy, check how regional tickets need validating. Several Italian regional tickets have to be stamped or activated before boarding, and inspectors are not always forgiving about it.

Try it on your next trip

Take the trip you are currently planning and write down every place you want to see. Open a timetable site and check the one-way train time between each pair of towns on your list. Whichever town has the most destinations under 90 minutes, and a station you can walk to, is your base candidate. Book that for the whole week before booking anything else, and fill in the day trips afterward. There are more ideas for choosing where to go in our destinations section.