My wife and I just made the exact same trip this past June your wife will be taking.

I would definitely recommend reservations/seat assignments, although I would wait until I got to Italy so as to give myself as much flexibility as possible as to departure times and dates. Just because you have a railpass doesn't guarantee you a seat, you are just guaranteed transportaition in the first class car (which could mean standing). For our trips between the cities you mentioned, we made seat reservations ($5) so that we were guaranteed a seat in a non-smoking car. For smaller day trips to smaller cities of less than an hour in length, we just went w/o seat reservations.

Right now is the prime tourist season (and soon many Italians will be taking their summer vacations also) so the trains between prime tourist cities are very crowded. For the US$5, I would make seat reservations. Just be aware that seat reservations must be made well in advance of departure (I think it was a minimum of 3 hours in advance). We would make our seat reservations the evening before we departed (or sometimes early in the morning the day of our departure) before we started our final day of site seeing in a city.




[This message has been edited by onedog (edited 08-05-2000).]