Probably not.  Italy has a great rail system.  There are numerous trains every hour between most cities.  Sometimes trains sell out, but there’s usually another train in an hour or less.  For popular routes and times, buy the tickets as soon as you get to Italy  — or buy them from home directly from the Italian rail company at www.trenitalia.com … You can change your reservation (and use the ticket on a different train) one time with no fee at the ticket kiosks as long as you do it before the original departure date.

It’s easy to buy tickets (which will include the reservation if required) from the automated kiosks (very user friendly in English).  You can also buy on-line from trenitalia.com — you get a confirmation number that you enter at the kiosk and it prints your ticket.  You can go “ticketless” with just the confirmation from your printer on some routes — but I always feel better printing out the ticket at the kiosk.  Sign up with trenitalia.com and get user ID and password before you leave home.

I’d have to disagree. When I was in Italy (in June, two summers ago) I thought I was being a little paranoid in buying the tickets and seat reservations early on, but I fould when I was on the trains there were a ton of people getting kicked off for not having reservations. I’m sure this depends on what kind of routes you’re taking (routes to smaller towns may not be as crowded), but if you plan on hitting some of the big sights then you might want to make the reservations. I was glad I did.

  Yes, you must have reservations on many Italian trains and you’ll get kicked off if it’s required you don’t have one.  However, if you’re not using a railpass you don’t have to do anything special to get a reservation and you can usually make reservations up until about an hour before train time.  If you buy your ticket for a specific train on a specific date/time it will include the reservation.