Traveling to Italy this year?           My 2024 travel itinerary

Last year I finally got to go on my bucketlist "roadtrip" to Italy. I read online multiple places that you had to plan your trip well in advance as both hotels, trains, activities and restaurants tend to get booked fast - and this turned out to be true in many cases (but not all). However, if you plan to visit 7 different cities in 17(!) days like I did, you should probably start early and plan ahead. Another important note on that part is to be open to changes and realistic - you cannot do everything all day everyday. Especially if you travel during the summer. We weren't prepared for how much the heat would take a toll on us.

Anyways - let's get to it! In this post I will do an overall summary of our travel itinerary: where did we go, how did we travel, how did I plan my trip and find hotels, activities and restaurants.

I've created a map, as seen below, that shows the different cities/places we went to. We started off in Milan and had a day-trip to Lake Como, then set off to Venice, then Florence, Rome, Naples, and the Amalfi coast, before we went back to Naples and then back home.

So let's get a bit more detailed in how I planned the trip. How did I research? Where did I get my information from? What platforms did I use? How did I get around?

Hotels

When I book hotels, what I usually do is to look up the city on a map and try to get an overview of the city. Where's the city center? Where's the beach? Where's the shopping areas? Where are the known places we want to visit? It all really depends on which city I'm going to stay in and what the goals for the trip is. For example weren't beaches something I considered when planning a multi-city trip to Italy, so I could just cross that off the list.

When I feel like I have an overview I think about what it is that we want to do while we're there. In this spesific trip we wanted to be full on tourists and visit every monument, museum, buildings etc. that we could in a very short amount of time (remember that we had about 1-3 days in each city) - so staying close to these were definitely a must! If you're planning on staying longer and truly embark on the cities hidden secrets and enjoy the locals, then you should probably look for other areas instead and don't book in the city center.

A lot of the times, when choosing where to stay, I also do some research online on what areas are the best for my goals. Most times there are several forums or articles about "where to stay if you've never been in x before", "where to stay if you only have two days", "where to stay if you want to experience the best local cuisine" and so on. Navigating a new city in another country is difficult - so this is a really great way to get to know the different areas from locals or people that have been there before.

So how do I book hotels on my travels? Personally, it's pretty simple. I either use hotels.com or booking.com to find a place to stay - and sometimes airbnb. When I find a hotel that I like, I also most of the times look up the hotel directly (because I think it's better to book directly from the "source" than to use third-party platforms). However, unfortunately, most of the times it is actually cheaper to book through third-parties.

Now that you know where I book my hotels, it's time to look at certain criteria. Do you remember the first part where I wrote about the purpose and goals of your trip? When choosing a hotel this is important to keep in mind. What areas did you think was best suited for your trip? Based on that, you should be able to find some hotels that you'd like to stay at. Moving on, there's a criteria that I always follow when I book a hotel - and that is to set the review score (or whatever it's called - the overall score) to a minimum of 8! I basically only stay at hotels that are ranked higher than 8. I could consider a place that was ranked 7 if there were no other alternatives and it seemed okay, but I would never go for a hotel with a lower ranking than that! If you, on the other side, book directly from a hotel, I wouldn't necessarily be scared if it only had two stars, as those ratings most of the times just reflects what kind of amenities the hotel has, but I would of course look at the reviews the hotel had on google or on third-party platforms as well.

Trains and ferries

Moving on to transportation - what is the best way to get around? First of, you should research your alternatives, and again, think about what your goals for the trip is. If you want to see absolutely everything you can see - such as small villages, beautiful landscapes, and maybe even drive close to the sea (not only experience the cities) then renting a car is probably the best way to get around! If you don't have a license, are scared to drive in a foreign country or want to minimize your travel-time, then getting around by train is the right choice for you! You can probably find buses too I guess, but with the speed and cheap prices of the trains that they have in Italy, I would highly recommend choosing the train. It was super easy to get by - even for someone that had never even been to Italy before!

But how does one buy tickets for the train? It depends on where you're going and what is cheapest! I used Italiarail, and I was super pleased! For most of my trips I chose premium class, as it was only a bit more expensive, but included complimentary welcome drink and snacks, leather seats, extra room for luggage and free WiFi (in addition to power outlet and air-condition that all classes have). I bought all of my tickets the 12th of january, and was fortunate enough to get "early-bird" tickets. Most trains doesn't really release the train tickets before closer to the specific dates (if you order a while ahead of time), but by using Italiarail you could buy the tickets early - and once the tickets for the dates you wanted were released, they would buy them for you and send them to you. What is even greater with the early-bird tickets is that you pay a given price and if the tickets turns out to be cheaper once released, then you get the difference back! They were also changeable once free of charge, or you could cancel them with a 10% fee of the price. When I got my tickets I think every single one turned out to be cheaper - so I got about a 120€ refund. Most of the tickets were cheaper than tickets on other train sites as well (I checked), except one, which we then cancelled and bought at another site (Trenitalia) instead. The refund went very smoothly. I got a conformation mail straight away, and the money back in just a couple of days. For our trip to Lake Como we used another train line, Trenord, which I'll come back to in a later post specifically about our trip to Lake Como - how to get there, how to get around by ferry, the timetables, what we did etc. I will also go into detail about the ferry from Naples to Amalfi in another post.

Activities

Activities is something you should look into while planning your trip, so that you don't have to waste an awful amount of time once you're there to figure out what you want to do, how to get your tickets, find out that they're already sold out, and so on. As mentioned earlier, it might also be a good tactic to find out what you want to do and see, and then consider booking a hotel based on that - especially if you have a short amount of time.

When I was planning what I wanted to do I did a lot of research online for each city. I used google for articles, social media such as instagram and tiktok for posts and videos, and found some travel platforms for booking activities.

If you're using google you can look up for example "what to do in x", "activities in x" and so on. If you want to have a look at instagram or tiktok you can easily just look up the name of the city you're going to. On instagram it can also be smart to find pages such as italy, italyexplores and visititaly to get inspiration for your trip. Another tip is to find travel advisors to follow, such as travelbymitra. They often give you historic insights and do's and don'ts - such as how to spot a good/bad gelato place or how to get the best view of the colosseum.

For travel platforms, I can highly recommend Viator and Getyourguide! We had the best time doing an authentic pizza making class in Naples through Viator and a wine tasting tour in Chianti with Getyourguide! These sites are easy to navigate and packed with fun activities. Most of the activities are also possible to cancel free of charge - which is gives you a lot of flexibility when you're planning your trip! I will tell you more about the activities I booked in later posts.

Lastly, I can highly recommend Turbopass. Turbopass is a city pass, that includes several attractions and experiences. You can choose how many days you want, and some of them also have add-ons that you can buy (or remove for a cheaper overall price). For example, in the Rome Turbopass you could get entrance to Colosseum for 18€ or 25€ for the Vatican museums and Sistine chapel. These are tickets that can be hard to get a hold of or that are very expensive - so for that price and the fact that they just buy them for you and send them to you once available is just amazing! On my trip I bought a Turbopass for both Venice and Rome, and were pleasantly surprised. If you're curious about what is included you can just head to the site and look up the cities you're interested in, and you'll get an overview.

Restaurants

When I was doing my research for the trip, I read several places that you should book restaurants well ahead as they tend to be fully booked months in advance. In my experience, this was not true. We never struggled to find a place to eat because it was crowded - I think we always got a table where we wanted, and we were in Italy for 17 days! However, if you do like fine dining or doesn't want to eat at the touristy restaurants (as they, in my opinion, tend to have low-quality and non-authentic food) it can be smart to do some research on where to go. What I did was to look up on google "where to eat in x" and read several articles and looked at the map if they were nearby where we would stay. I also found some restaurants on instagram, and there's particularly one that I will tell you about later, that was located in Venice! What I also do is to look at the Michelin guide. There you can always find lots of restaurant with quality cooking. If you want to opt for something not too pricey, you can look for the "bib gourmand", which is used to highlight restaurants that serves exceptionally good food at moderate prices - or just restaurants that are in the guide without an distinction. We went to two restaurants in Rome, one with bib gourmand and one without a distinction - and the latter had the best carbonara we had ever tasted. We'd go back to Rome just for that carbonara! And it only cost like 13€ too I think, so actually cheaper than most of the tourist-places. 

I also used TheFork for several of my dinner reservations. If you make a reservation and then pay with TheFork pay, you will gather points which you can use to get discounts for future meals on chosen restaurants. We got a free dinner because of this on our last day. If you want to earn 500 points you can use my referral code for your first booking as well. Other than that, it's easy to manage all your restaurant bookings when they're gathered in one place.