Your saved trips
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How the builder plans your route
Italy stretches about 750 miles (1,200 km) from the Alps to Sicily, and every change of hotel costs about half a day: checkout, the station, the train, the new hotel, the wait for the room. Good trips stay at least two nights in each place and three or four in Rome. The builder compares nine proven routes (Rome, Florence and Venice, with an optional night in Umbria or Bologna; Venice to the Amalfi Coast; Rome, Naples, Pompeii and the Amalfi Coast; Florence, Tuscany, Umbria and Rome; Milan, Lake Como, Verona, the Dolomites and Venice; Milan, Piedmont, the Cinque Terre and Florence; Sicily from Palermo to Taormina; Puglia and Matera; and Rome with Sardinia), picks the one that best fits your interests and travel month, and gives each stop enough nights to be worth the move. It flags places that are much easier with a car, stops that are out of season, and festival weeks when hotels fill.
Day 1 is your arrival day. Most flights from the US land in Italy between about 7 and 10 a.m., and hotel rooms are rarely ready before 2 or 3 p.m., so plan a light first afternoon. Your flight home comes after the last day shown. Travel times are from our getting around guide and the destination pages, and assume the fastest train or normal traffic. Where trains thin out, in the Tuscan and Umbrian hill towns, the Dolomites, Sicily, Puglia and Sardinia, a bus or a rental car takes over.
Saving and sharing
“Save this trip” keeps the plan in this browser, so it's here when you come back. “Copy share link” makes a link that opens this exact plan for anyone you send it to. “Ask us to plan it” sends the route to our planning form so we can turn it into a booked trip.
Insider tip
If your route ends far from where it started, price an open-jaw ticket (the airlines call it “multi-city”): into Venice and home from Rome, into Milan and home from Venice, or into Palermo and home from Catania. On the same airline or alliance it often costs close to a round trip, and it saves you a half day of backtracking. Rental companies charge a fee to drop a car in a different city, so plan the drive in the middle of the trip and use trains at both ends. See flights.
Different from home
Italy's fast trains run city center to city center, so a 1 hr 30 min ride from Rome to Florence really is 1 hr 30 min. Cities are best without a car, and nearly every historic center is a camera-enforced ZTL (restricted traffic zone) whose fines reach Americans months later. If you choose “Happy to rent a car”, pick it up as you leave the last city, ideally at an airport or a station on the edge of town, and carry an International Driving Permit with your US license. See driving in Italy.
Watch out
Transport strikes (scioperi) are announced in advance on the Ministry of Infrastructure's strike calendar, often for a Friday; check it a week before each travel day. Hydrofoils to Capri, along the Amalfi Coast and to the islands are cancelled for wind and swell more often than visitors expect, so never schedule a ferry on the same day as your flight home.
Next steps: price it with the budget calculator, book trains and check strike rules in getting around, see when to go and festivals for the seasons on your route, and read the entry requirements for the EU's Entry/Exit System before you fly. On a roots trip, start with Italian-American roots: you need your ancestor's comune (town) before you can search the records, and the records tell you where to go.