7 day vacation- Rome, Venice, Florence
 

Hi my name is Art. I'm planning our 13th anniversary in November 2018, destination Rome, Venice and Florence. I've been reading comments and realize doing all three will be a strain. Since this is our first time abroad together, I want to surprise her. We both like history, culture, museums, cathedrals, and of course good Italian food. Rome is on my top list but deciding on the other two I need a push. I really don't want to jump from hotel to hotel if possible but I'm flexible to make this trip memorable. Any advise will be helpful, thanks!!!

Welcome to Fodors!

While I understand your desire to include all three of these wonderful destinations in a single trip, I think you are right in think that "doing all three will be a strain." Only you can decide on which combination of two to include (or whether to visit just one), but I'll give you one consideration that perhaps hadn't come to your attention: Of these cities, Rome is the one that is easiest to reach for most international travelers, and therefore the easiest of the 3 to include in a future trip -- so deferring it might make the most sense. Florence and Venice can easily fill the time you have. (I wanted more than that!)

One other thought -- and forgive my temerity here -- are you sure your SO will want to be surprised by a fully planned trip?

I'm sure your trip will be memorable no matter what you choose, and congratulations on your anniversary!

I vote for Florence. She obviously loves Art.

Why not surprise her with the basic plans for the trip, a travel video or Italian dinner or something that ties in, but make the trip for Spring when weather will be nicer and days longer, and let her help with the decision making?

I used to give the same advice about not trying to do too much but then last March I went to Italy with a friend who had never been there and we ended up doing the classic "Rome-Florence-Venice" whirl-wind trip and it was great. I always travel much slower but I have to say, if you want a taste if Italy in a week it can be done. You do need to do research ahead of time (and this forum can help) so you don't waste time though. And are you sure you can't squeeze out at least one more day making the trip 8 or 9 days. You're going through the expense and hassle of getting there and one or two more days will make a difference.

Here's the trip report I wrote on that trip - https://www.fodors.com/community/eur...march-1290060/

Photos and blog - Zenfolio | Isabel's_View | Italy through Fresh Eyes - Chashing the sun in Italy in March - Part 1 Venice

My trip to Italy was that long and I did all three without feeling rushed. Make a detailed itinerary and see if all three make sense for you. If you have to choose between Venice and Florence, I'd opt for Venice.

You have a good idea tp surprise your wife with an anniversary trip. If you do not want to jump from hotel to hotel a cogent strategy might be to just stay in Roma and maybe take a day trip to Florence. Roma is immense and there is plenty to see and do in a week's time.

You never mentioned if this week includes travel time to and from Italy. if you only have seven days then you are down to five days in country. Generally, arriving in-country and then transiting to your hotel will take a minimum of one half day. so now you are down to 4.5 days in Roma. This does not account for the possible jet lag you may experience. If you add two days making the total nine days you will have a more time in-country.

IMHO, less is more and you can always return. Italy will seduce you and you may well want to return.

Buon viaggio,

I realize this is not travel advice and that it is belaboring the point. Some will think your idea to surprise your wife with this gift is wonderful. Hopefully, you know your wife well enough to be sure she will be pleased, but travel is a big deal. I was at a party once where a husband surprised his wife with tickets for a trip. Everyone was stunned when she was not at all excited, said a polite thank you, and was quiet the rest of the evening. I understand it now. They had also been married several years and still he did not see how she felt with no imput on such a big thing. Because DH loves surprises, it took him years and years to believe I meant it when I said I did not like any surprise bigger than a bouquet of flowers.

Are there kids involved or grand children, or a job or pets, or family events or holidays like Thanksgiving? Will she enjoy the winter time experience and such a short, rushed trip? I would be disappointed to say the least, but perhaps there is none of that for her to consider and she will be absolutely thrilled, so I won't mention it again.

Book trains well in advance to score sweet discounted fares over full price fares but such tickets can sell out early as they are limited in number - book at Acquista il biglietto con le nostre offerte - Trenitalia or www.italotreno.com - competing railways with own trains running on same tracks and using same stations. Italo is much cheaper often on same-day fares. www.seat61.com has didactic info on doing just that; www.budgeteuroetravel.com and www.ricksteves.com has general info on trains.

First, how are you counting "7 day vacation"? And where are coming from? Depending on how you are counting days, the number of cities you can visit changes.
If I assume you are coming from the North America, here are some interpretations.

Interpretation #1: 7 calendar days including departure day = 5 nights in Italy
day 1: leave home
day 2: arrive in Italy
day 3 full day #1
day 4 full day #2
day 5 full day #3
day 6 full day #4
day 7 fly home

Interpretation #2: 7 calendar days in Italy = 6 nights in Italy
day 0: leave home
​​​​​​​day 1: arrive in Italy
day 2 full day #1
day 3 full day #2
day 4 full day #3
day 5 full day #4
day 6 full day #5
day 7 fly home

Interpretation #3: 7 duration days in Italy = 168 hours = 6 nights.
day 1 arrival
day 2 full day #1
day 3 full day #2
day 4 full day #3
day 5 full day #4
day 6 full day #5
day 7 full day #6
day 8 fly home

Interpretation #4: 7 full days in Italy = 8 nights.
day 1 arrival
day 2 full day #1
day 3 full day #2
day 4 full day #3
day 5 full day #4
day 6 full day #5
day 7 full day #6
day 8 full day #7
day 9 fly home

With only 7 days I would do:
Venice/Florence
Florence/Rome
Venice/Rome
OR
only Rome

I would not try to do all 3 cities in only 7 days on the ground.

I would LOVE to take this trip.

I would HATE for it to be a "surprise".

I would agree totally with Suze's last two posts. Unless you are 99.999 percent positive your SO likes surprises, I would let her have input.

Free advice, worth what you are paying: Surprise your wife with the trip ITINERARY but book nothing until she approves. Not only will you be a great guy, but you won't make any irreversible errors.

If you have 7 days including travel, either just do Rome or do Venice then Rome.

Helpful comments
 

Thanks everyone for your input. We're leaving from Tampa, Florida, even though I would want to surprise her with this trip, it's also wise to include her in the planning. She will be just as surprise when I present it to her. We will spend 6 full days there, not counting leaving from (Florida and the arrival day). Much appreciation for all advice, we will use a little bit of all to finalize our trip, especially the websites of transportation and other helpful sites. Now, homework time!! Will consider all three
(Rome, Venice, and Florence, with Rome (Roma) being the front runner, either way, its going to be wonderful. Thanks everyone and if you have more to add, hit me up. Once again THANK YOU!!!

:ok::)

Good choice! :star: :star: :star:

Smart Man!

We now know how my full days you have. If you still insist on three cities, it is now a simple math to come up with just how much time you can have in each city.
If you have 6 full days, you take away 2 full days to move between three cities. That leave 4 full days. If you want at least a full day at each stop, it is now a simple math to realize that one city gets 2 full days while other two gets 1 full day each. Do you still want to hit three cities?
To avoid further wasting time = additional half day backtracking hit, look at an open-jaw itinerary. Into Venice, out of Rome, or into Rome, out of Venice. From many cities, these are not interchangeable. Look closely at arrival and departure times for each scenario. Early morning departure from Venice is more painful than the early morning departure from Rome.
If you insist on three cities, it is impossible to avoid "jump from hotel to hotel ." If you are willing to short change the Renaissance art and architecture, one way to avoid "jump from hotel to hotel" is not to stay overnight in Florence. Leave Venice early, store your luggage at the Florence station and visit Florence as a long transit day trip. Retrieve your luggage and take a late train from Florence to Rome. The fast train to Rome runs until about 10pm.

I really love Florence, there are so many different possibilities on things you can do. Dining, culture, music, lot's of museums. You can also find some very great and famous sculptures throughout the city.

I like your anniversary trip idea and plan a lot!
Go for it! :D

Be nice if you could add a few days and make all of the big three possible.

OK 6 days. I would just do Rome. Or Venice/Florence. All 3 major cities in only 6 days CAN be done on the run... but is really not very practical imo.

It's all going to be one huge rush-around. Is that what you want for an anniversary trip? You say it's your first trip abroad together, so I assume you have absolutely no idea what the realities are of packing your bags, getting to a train station, finding your track, getting to it (likely hauling bags down stairs into an underground passage then up again), figuring out what car you are in and finding the place to stand on the quai to have easy access to that, taking the train ride, then doing all that in reverse when you get there plus getting yourself oriented in a new city and getting settled in a new place. That's all before you even venture forth and start to sightsee. And that's all assuming you can read at least a bit of Italian.

I live in Europe and take fairly complicated train trips all the time, and let me tell you they are not hah-ha fun unless you are entirely comfortable with the procedures in the country you are traveling in and can speak the local language in case of something going wrong. Sure, it can all go smoothly, and the train companies want it to, but I can't tell you how many people I see floundering around in train stations in `Europe with little idea of what's going on. You might be brilliant at these sorts of logistics, I don't know. It could also easily degenerate into a logistics nightmare.

You have a severely limited amount of time to spend in Europe. Pick one city and maybe take an easy daytrip or two from it. Otherwise, your anniversary trip is going to be nothing more than packing and unpacking and ablur of train stations and bouts of anxiety about whether you've got this allfigured out or not.

I wish you well. Keep it really simple.

!!!

Since you have Greg"s interpretation 3 and Rome is your priority I would spend the entire visit in Rome unless you did an open jaw in which case Rome/Venice would be a rushed decent tandem. You could always do a long day trip from Rome to Florence or Venice if you ran out of things to do in Rome.

Yeah, I think Rome and Venice is the choice. It'll give us more incentive to hurry back to visit the other cities

Good point!!

could do a few=hour drop=in in Florence en route - see the place and whet your appetite to come back. put bags in train station left-luggage,

I do think you need to talk it over with your wife - and only you and she know what kind of trip you want. Do you want long leisurely meals and lots of sitting in cafes sipping coffee or wine - or do you want to see as much as you can. Both types of trips are OK and there are lots of people who would hate one or the other. Also depends on how 'travel savvy' you are and how much research you want to do ahead. Again, everyone is different. There are plenty of people (on this board and elsewhere) who just love the planning and research (I am one of them). Point is, nothing wrong with just going to Rome and hanging out, maybe take a guided tour to two - don't have to do any research, probably won't get lost. Also nothing wrong with planning a packed full 7 days to see the highlights of three great cities. You have to use common sense. If you had said you wanted to see those cities plus Tuscany, the Amalfi Coast and Sicily. Well that of course if not reasonable. But plenty of people love a relatively whirlwind visit and Venice, Florence and Rome in a week is not crazy.

You fly into Venice, read a guide book or two regarding options of getting from the airport (couple of different ones, cost vs time) but if your plane lands in the morning and you book a hotel near the train station you can easily have dropped your bags and go out for an amazing stroll by lunch time. Best way to deal with jet lag is walk, Venice is made for walking. See a whole lot, have a couple nice meals and go to bed early. Then another full day. The next day have another walk in the morning and take a mid day train to Florence. Buy food to have a picnic lunch on the train (you can get decent lunch food right in the train station). By the time to get to Florence it's mid afternoon, drop your bags at your hotel (somewhere between the train station and the Duomo - it's only about 15 minutes from one to the other) and you have afternoon and evening to sight-see. Another full day in Florence. Then on to Rome for three nights.

You need to decide if you want to spend an hour or so reading up on train travel in Italy (I don't disagree with anything StCirq said but she did kind of make it sound worse than it really is). The train trips between Venice and Florence and Rome are very straight forward. And choose your hotels with location in mind. The booking.com site has a map option which can really help narrow down your choices.

I have a friend taking the exact same itinerary in August this year. She's heading there for her honeymoon. Rome and Florence sound great. If you do want to add another place, consider Milan - it's high on culture and the cathedrals here are very pretty.

So, travel_love, you live in Milan? “. . . . the cathedrals [here] are very pretty.”

typo -meant there?

Is there not just one cathedral per city?

But the Milan cathedral experts say is:

"Cathedral Milan Duomo Santa Maria Nascente is the most important example of Gothic architecture in Italy."

Not sure there are any other cathedrals in Milan but it is an ABC city - Another Bloody Church everywhere you look and yes they are very pretty inside and out.

There is only one cathedral per bishopric, assuming it's a Roman Catholic cathedral (there are exceptions to the RC designation). Milan has only one, so whether it was "here" or "there" it doesn't matter.

One of the most beautiful, and the oldest, church in Milan is the Basilica di Sant'Ambrogio.

Some fun facts: In most Italian cities, the "Duomo" is the cathedral, but not always. The word "duomo" generally refers the most important church in a city. Some cathedral cities, like Rome, don't have a duomo. There are a few cities, like Ragusa, that have both a duomo and a cathedral. St. Peter's Basilica is neither a cathedral nor a duomo. The cathedral of Rome is St. John Lateran.

Then there is "basilica", which is just an official title for an important church. There can be many basilicas in a city.

Finally, in Milan the Catholic Church follows the liturgy of Saint Ambrose, not the Roman liturgy. Apart from the somewhat different structure of the mass, the calendar is slightly different: Advent is six weeks long, Lent starts on a Saturday, and there are a few other differences.

I live in Europe and take fairly complicated train trips all the time, and let me tell you they are not hah-ha fun unless you are entirely comfortable with the procedures in the country you are traveling in and can speak the local language in case of something going wrong.>>

That just about sums me up on my last trip where everything was going swimmingly until I stupidly followed everyone else off my Bologna to Venice train and found myself on the wrong side of the lagoon in Mestre. Idiot or what? luckily there are loads of trains between Mestre and Venice Santa Lucia [the main station] so I was fine, apart from the bruises I had on my leg from where I'd kicked myself. So it can happen to the best of us - and me.

The good news is that I was staying near the station so when I got there I didn't have far to walk. If you would like a recommendation for a very conveniently placed and pleasant hotel close to the station, vaporetto and Alilagua stops, [the water bus that run between Venice and the airport] just ask.

Personally with 6 days I would settle on staying in just Rome and Venice and leave Florence for the next time. If you changed your minds, it's only 90 mins on the train from Rome to Florence. That would be better than trying to get there from Venice from where the journey is over 2 hours.

<<Originally Posted by xcountry https://www.fodors.com/community/ima...s/viewpost.gif
I vote for Florence. She obviously loves Art.>>

Lol, bvl. I read it but didn't see it. We have more snow. You?

and thank you for explaining about Duomi and Basiliche [are those plurals correct?]

Hi Ann, your purals are correct, although I've never heard anyone use the plural of "duomo".

Our snowfall has all melted away, except on the mountains. We're supposed to get more snow on Wednesday, but I don't know if I believe it. It's almost impossible to predict snow where we live, in the foothills of the Apennines. We could have rain, and the next town uphill, a stone's throw from us, could have snow.

I think almost everyone missed xcountry's little joke.

Hi Ann, your purals are correct, although I've never heard anyone use the plural of "duomo">>

Thanks, bvl, and Hi back at you. I would have looked them up in my Italian dictionary but it's outside in the car and when I wanted to post that reply it was freezing outside thanks to the "beast from the east Mark 2" that hit us yesterday. I hope that it misses you because they had to close the road that I would have taken to get home from my mum's, had I ben foolish enough to try to get there.

It just struck me that I'd never heard the plurals of either word, and wondered what they were. Glad my instincts were right!

Almost everyone missed the joke, but not you!

Duomi - wow but maybe in English we could use the Italian word like Duomos? Like Chateaux in French.

Palenq, I can't imagine that anyone would ever need to use the plural of duomo, but if you do, feel free to say "duomos". To my ears, it doesn't grate as badly as someone saying he had a panini (plural) for lunch.
​​​​​

Pal - it was by way of being a linguistic joke rather than a suggestion that we should all start using it.

bvl - it's one of our family bugbears - every time someone says 'I'll have a panini" we do a group wince. [except they usually say "I'll get a panini" and then we have to wince twice"]