Ferry From italy mainland to sardinia
Ferry from Genoa – Porto Torres/olbia
From Genoa, a city in northwest Italy, we took the ferry to Sardinia. Sardinia is an Italian island in the Mediterranean Sea and it is the second largest island in the Mediterranean Sea after Sicily.
Parking
We parked at a free parking close to the city center and the main tourist attractions in Genoa. The parking is easy to access. From 8 AM to 6 PM, there are almost no spaces available but if you arrive late you can choose your spot. The parking will be almost empty around 6-7 PM so you can eat and cook outside but early in the morning the parking lot quickly fills up with cars of people coming to visit Genoa for 1 day. It is close to the road so it’s a bit noisy at night and there is a lot of garbage and rats so it is not the perfect camping spot but it is free and close to the city.
Tickets
We looked up some prices online for our ferry trip and the cheapest we could find was around € 130 (including service fees) for two people and a car in 2022. Directferries.nl was a nice site to make our booking. This site compares the prices of different ferry organizations and shows you the possibilities to book a cabin or reserved seats. However, you can also buy the ferry tickets on the Genoa docks if you like but we have no idea of the prices. We preferred to book our ticket online so we could compare the prices for different days and from different organizations to find the cheapest one. Depending on what day you’ll leave there is a very big price difference. If you have time, we suggest checking the site in the morning and in the evening to see what time and day is the cheapest. You can choose a retour ticket or a single ticket. We didn’t know when we would go back to Italy so we booked a single ticket. There is almost no price difference between a retour ticket and two times a single ticket. There are two ports in Sardinia (Olbia and Porto Torres). Olbia is a larger port but at that time the tickets were more expensive than the tickets to Porto Torres. It will only take you 4 hours to cross the island so in that case it doesn’t really matter where you arrive. It is an 11-hour trip. Most of the ferries between Sardinia and Italy leave around 9 pm to arrive around 8 am, so a cabin to sleep in would be nice. At the moment of our booking, a cabin was around € 160 (on top of your ticket), which seemed ridiculous to us. There are plenty of quiet places where you can sleep on the floor so we took our sleeping pad and blanket and found a nice place. In theory, it is not allowed but no one seemed to care.
