Travel to Italy

Milan, Monterosso, Florence, Venice, and back to Milan.

Hotel’s or B&B’s booked all around. Early reservation for the Accademia in Florence. The rest, ie: daytrip to San Gimignano, will be planned in stride.

-a

Little by little it’s all coming together. We’ve confirmed reservations in Milan at Hotel Baviera Mokinba for our entry and departure hotel. Very reasonable and right next to the train terminal. We’re still playing around with where to stay after Milan. We basically have two nights before we have to be in Florence. We looked at staying in Portofino but it’s a bit too stiff. However, right outside at Santa Margherita, is right on the money. From there we’ve found generic-ish flats in Vernazza, but we may stay farther south towards Riomaggiore. If anyone has a suggestion, we’re open to it for that day/night. We just want to walk a bit of Cinque Terre. Train it to Florence where I am waiting to hear back from Hotel Aprile, a very nice looking establishment. Then in Venice a few days later we’ll be at Pensione La Calcina which also looks great.

I’ll break all this out with links when it’s all said and done.

-a

Alrighty, after much thought and a lot of flight jockeying I’ve purchased our tickets from May 30th to June 10th. Yay. It’s coming! It’s coming! Wheeeeeee!

-a

We got a slew of responses from my request. We’ve got to iron out the days and the start and end point. However I think we are good on where.

Milan, Venice, Florence, Excursion to Siena or San Gimignano, through/break in Pisa, & Cinque Terre.

Need to see what fares very between starting/stopping in Milan, Venice, or Pisa and accomodations.

-a

We’ve started making decisions and I sent this to some friends and family for input. If anyone has more to add, bring it on ;)

Here’s how we’re divising our trip. Maybe it’s backwards but it seems to work. First we picked out locations, next we’re making lists of sites to see, now we are polling those who know the country of special places within or close to the places we will be, then prioritize what we want out of each of these lists, finally we will apply a duration to each place and then we book.

Our current thoughts are a to stay with trains since Robin nor I have driven in Italy yet and as our first real excursion to the country we’d rather not pile too many worries on our plate. We’ve decided on Milan, Florence, Verona, and Venice. Early probabilities are a short stay in milan, longer in florance, short in verona, longer in venice, but thats still to be decided. We’ve got most of the regional galleries and sites to see, what we’re looking for are neat eateries, caffe’s, an easy excursion from the norm. We’d like to see local sights, eat great food, see some caffe’s that might lend us ideas for our own shop, anything else that might round our trip out nicely. We’re looking at leaving at the end of May so our timers are running pretty hot right now.

-a

My wife and I are planning a trip to Italy late May/early June. We’re trying to figure out exactly what is important to us and how we want to spend our time while there. We’re planning on staying 7-10 days on a $5-7k USD budget. While I have been to some of Italy it was while I was a kid and it doesn’t reference real well for this trip.

Motivators.. My wife and I both love food and great coffee/espresso. We are opening a caffe’ and hope to see some venues that lend ideas to our own store. Tieing all this in to the fact that we enjoy history.. Easy to see why Italy is on our list. Now just how to spend the time.

We’ve started using SlowTrav Italy to find more resources. We’ve also got family that has been there, some on many occassions so I know we can develop a good simple plan that isn’t overly complicated. Our current thoughts have been fly in to Rome, keep on trains instead of cars and head to Florance, and then end in Venice, each stop about 3 days.

We’ll see where this all heads!

-C9