Saying this as a non-Italian, instead of focusing on (presumably) pricey train tickets targeting tourists, they should rather extend the common network which is also accessible and usable to the population without a tourism-adjusted overprice ...
The trains are used pretty extensively and they works.
The Trenitalia has fixed fares on the low speed lines (so no need to buy them weeks before) and are resonably priced.
I the south...EH.
Would use them only for an extensive trip (from a big city to another big city)
But by nature Italy HAS to use a lot of air travel as the country is very long and that's problematic.
(don't forget than Sicily has 5M people and the 2 main airports see 9M people transit a year)
In the last 20-30 years there have been huge improvements on a handful of (highly trafficated) routes, and a corresponding amount of worsening in all the rest.
Besides the so-called "digital divide" (widely different possibilities of access to the internet depending on your location), there is a clear "railroad divide", the biggest/main cities are well connected, all the rest is at the same level as (or worse than) the '60's (or even earlier).
There is a way to draw maps abstracting from geometrical projections (anamorphic), based on some given parameters, if you choose "travel time by train" what you will get will be a "time cartogram" where Italy is very short (north-south) but very, vey thick (west-east).
[1] on selected routes