Night train route
Intercity Notte Rome–Palermo
Rome → Palermo · Italy
Intercity Notte Rome–Palermo in pictures
Photographs by their authors, hosted on Wikimedia Commons · tap through for the licence
- Distance
- 920 km
- Fastest time
- 12 h 30 min
- Average speed
- 74 km/h
- Top speed
- 160 km/h
- Operator
- Trenitalia
- Train
- Intercity Notte sleeper
- Countries
- Italy
- In service since
- 1899
- Runs
- daily
Figures are published values, not live data · corrections log
Europe’s last train on a ship: the sleeper is split at Villa San Giovanni and floated across the Strait of Messina before breakfast.
Sleepers have crossed to Sicily since 1899, and this is the last place in Europe where a passenger train still boards a ship. The Intercity Notte leaves Rome after dinner, runs the Tyrrhenian coast through the night, and at dawn is split into sections and shunted onto the ferry at Villa San Giovanni. Passengers can climb to the deck for the crossing of the Strait of Messina, then roll back down to their bunks for the run along Sicily’s north coast to Palermo.
How this line was checked
- Line drawn from 2 OpenStreetMap relations, their own nodes end to end: relation 1779702 (213 km), relation 10071532 (222 km) — 435 km of the route between them
- Checked against OpenStreetMap: 99.7% of this line lies within 250 m of real track (median 11 m); the longest stretch away from it is 2.5 km
- Checked against the running timetable via ÖBB Scotty: our line sits 0.1 km from the shape of IC 723
Along the way
- Tyrrhenian coast by night
- Ferry loading at Villa San Giovanni
- On-deck Strait of Messina crossing
- Sicilian north coast
- Cefalù rock & cathedral
- Arrival beneath Monte Pellegrino
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All sleepers serving these cities: night trains from Rome · all 108 night trains.
More train routes in Italy.