Roma Termini to Palermo Centrale is Trenitalia's Intercity Notte flagship — the longest sleeper run in the country, and the only overnight train in Europe that boards a ship mid-journey. At Villa San Giovanni, the entire train — carriages, cabins, sleeping passengers and all — rolls onto a train ferry, crosses the Strait of Messina, and rolls off in Sicily to continue on to Palermo. Depart Rome at 20:14 (a later 23:50 departure also runs most nights) and arrive roughly 13 hours later having crossed an entire sea without once leaving your bed.

Flights to Palermo are cheap and short, and most people take them. This is for the traveller who wants the mainland-to-island transition to feel like something rather than nothing — who'd rather sleep through the crossing than queue at a gate for it. It also suits anyone stitching together a longer Italian rail trip, since the train drops you at Palermo Centrale, in the city, with no airport transfer required at either end.

There are other night trains and there are other ferries, but there is nothing else quite like this: a sleeper carriage driven bodily onto a ship. The maneuver at Villa San Giovanni — where the train is split into sections, shunted onto the ferry deck, and locked down for the crossing — happens in the small hours, and most passengers sleep through it entirely. That's rather the point. This is Trenitalia's Intercity Notte network at its most emblematic, and the reason it's the flagship route on this board. The same ferry crossing also carries sleeper services from Rome and Naples down to Catania and Siracusa, and Intercity Notte runs sister overnight routes linking Milan and Turin to Sicily, Milan and Turin to Lecce, and Reggio Calabria up to Turin and Genoa — worth knowing about if Rome–Palermo doesn't line up with your dates, though none of them cross water quite like this one does.

Trenitalia's top sleeper tier, Superior — rebranded from Excelsior in 2024 — adds a private en-suite bathroom to the cabin. It's confirmed running on the Roma–Udine route, not on this one, so it isn't an option here — but worth knowing about if a fully private bathroom matters more to you than the Strait of Messina crossing does.