Italy - so much to see!
Guest post by Judy Toth
Recently my husband and I spent two weeks in Italy. We had never been to Italy before and I had quite a dilemma when I was planning the trip. So much to see, so little time!
I knew a little bit about a lot of places and so I started out trying to ensure we saw all the “high points” (museums in Florence, canals in Venice, historical monuments in Rome, the hilltowns of Tuscany, Pompeii, southern Italy where my mother was born).
As I began to try to fit this all in, I realized that I needed to pare the list down. I know that our preferences for travel are to see and truly learn a small area rather than hit the highlights of a vast area and to have approximately 50% of our time planned and about 50% open for ‘serendipity’.
I also didn’t feel the pressure to make sure we “see it all now because we may never be back”. Typically, when we find an area we like, we will go back to explore more on future visits.
Given those preferences I thought about what was really drawing us to Italy. The first big draw was to see the area where my mother was born. However, as I read about southern Italy, I learned that there is not much in the way of famous/historical sites and that area is less ‘user friendly’ for tourists. Since this was our first trip to Italy, it didn’t seem like that was place to start.
Tuscan countryside - it really does look like this!
Our second big draw was to see Tuscany. That became the beginning of my plan—how much could we see in and around Tuscany in two weeks? The plan we came up with was fly into Rome, train to Florence, drive to Pisa, drive through Tuscany, and train back to Rome.
We reasoned that we would start in the biggest city and, as we became more familiar with language, lifestyle etc, would work our way to smaller and smaller towns.
Our plan worked well and we feel that we learned a lot about a small portion of Italy. In my next several posts I’ll share with you what we learned.
See Judy’s 2 Week Tuscany Itinerary here.