Lo

Will be renting a car for a day or two while in Florence. Should we hold onto it for 1 additional day and drive to Rome or should we return it and travel by rail. There are four of us traveling. Our children will be 13 and 11. WE plan to travel from Venice to Florence by train. All comments are welcome.

Rex

You may well find tat rentals of less than three days are non-existent - - or the same price as (if not higher than) a shorter rental. So, if cost is important to you, I would drive onward to Rome.<BR><BR>Best wishes,<BR><BR>Rex<BR>

Leslie

(funny, we did the same trip in reverse w/ our 13 and 11 year olds)<BR><BR>While Rex makes a good point about the cost of short term rentals. I just can't make sense of why anyone would want a car while IN Florence. It will be more hassle than convenience. Most sights are w/in walking distance and taxi's are convenient.<BR><BR>Even though a one day car rental might be cheaper than four train tickets (the 11 yr old will go 1/2 price), the hassle of picking it up and returning it makes the train a more logical way to just get from one city to another.<BR><BR>But, if you have the car anyway, the drive from Florence to Rome is quite nice with lots of worthwhile places to visit enroute such as Siena and Orvieto. Our kids sure enjoyed the 4 day farmstay in between stays in Florence and Rome.

Joe

We trained from Venice to Florence and were sorry afterwards. We drove from Florence to Rome and it was great. This was on our first trip to Italy and we have never trained since. Depends on your time, but we did stop at Perugia, Spoletto, Assisi, Todi, Gubbio, Orvieto on our own schedule. Curious? How does picking up and dropping off a car differ from getting to the train station, buying tickets, getting to the right track, waiting for departure, looking for right seats and then doing some of the same in reverse when you arrive at your destination? Understand that some prefer the train and that is what makes the world go round, but, picking up and dropping off car is the difference? I don't think so. If you already have the car rented, it will be much lass expensive for four people to keep the car in a car park while in Florence and then drive on to Rome. We did drop the car off on the outskirts of Rome and took a cab into the City since our stay was several days.

lo

We would be using the car to travel ouside of Florence. Our hotel does offer parking for a fee. Another option would be to get some type of tour to San G and Sienna. I want to do some ceramic shopping and am under the impression that these towns would be good places to do that.<BR>I just want to figure out the best way to accomplish that witht he least amount of hassle and the most fun for all of us!