8 days in Italy early August
 

Planning a trip for the beginning of August to Italy. There will be 9 of us ranging in age from 18 - 60 years old. We all are active and love exploring. We like museums too. So many places to visit, not sure where to begin at all. Any suggestions?
Thank you

You need to narrow it down to what you think might work best for your group, esp. considering the wide age range and (presumably) differing priorities, interests, styles and speeds of travel, etc. Read some guidebooks, look at some YouTube videos, read some trip reports here.

Also, it would be helpful to know exactly how many days you'd travel, whether any of you have been to Italy before, whether you're comfortable exploring by car (you might need 3), whether you all can tolerate heat and humidity, etc. IMO, when there's a group, you have to first decide what kind of trip you want before you can figure out where to go.

Oh, sorry. I missed that the title indicates 8 days. That really limits your options. Considering the logistics of moving 9 people, I'd only consider two destinations. Fly into one and fly home from another.

Thank you for all your information. We will have 8 full days in Italy. We are all active types, used to heat and humidity, and have never been to Italy. If we started in Rome, any suggestions how many days to dedicate to Rome and which city would be best to go to next?
Thanks for all your help.

What are the main interests of your group?

I think you are looking at areas that logically come after you have gone over the underlining framework.

“How many days to dedicate to Rome” comes out after you have defined WHAT you are planning to accomplish. Without that defined, what determines how many days make sense?

“Which city would be best to go to next?” comes after you have determined it makes sense to begin the trip in Rome. Have you cross checked various itinerary options to come to this conclusions? Have you discarded starting the trip elsewhere and ending in Rome?

Also, in order to have “8 full days,” you would need to be staying 9 nights. It is possible to arrive super early in Italy on day 1 and return home in the evening on 9th day = 8 x 24 hour interval. However, if you are coming from the North America, many return trips leave Italy early in the morning making the 9th day not usable. If you have not done already, feed your flight destinations into your favorite booking engines. For example, if you are arriving at noon on day 1 and returning home at noon on day 9, it “appears” you have 8 full days, but you don’t. You have a few hours on arrival day until you have to sleep. It would be earlier if you have to deal with jet lag. Similarly, on the departure day, if the flight is at noon, you only have time to have breakfast in your hotel, then head to the airport.

Also, “active’, can be ambiguous. I was in Rome last month. My pedometer said I walked over 10 miles each day and climbed up and down perhaps 20 or more flights of stairs at museums, archaeological site, hotels, up and down several of the seven hills of Rome, etc. What is your definition of “active?”

Thanks for the information. Looks like I have a lot of work to do. I probably should have said that we might be coming from Barcelona, and I did factor in the travel days. We have 2 weeks. I thought 3 days in Barcelona and the rest for Italy. My definition of active is what Greg described above. It seems like there is a lot to do, but we wanted to try and see as much as we can, in the short amount of time. So, not sure how much time to dedicate to Rome?
Thanks.

"... not sure how much time to dedicate to Rome."

We can't help you until you decide what you want to see/do in Rome.

FWIW, I agree that "active" is ambiguous. I don't think of distance walked but, rather, hours spent sightseeing. Some things can be time-consuming without involving all that much walking, such as the Forum, the Colosseum, the Scavi tour, the Galleria Borghese. My husband and I have spent about a month in Rome over several trips, and we still haven't seen/done everything that interests us. Other people are happy if they only hit the "Top Ten" listed in guidebooks and websites.

Just to show you why what you want to do matters, here is an extreme example where the answer to the question, "So, not sure how much time to dedicate to Rome?" is ZERO days! What this poster assumed did not exist in Rome.
http://www.fodors.com/community/euro...ome-really.cfm

Thank you all for your input, I know I have a lot to research and this has helped. There is so much I want to do, I just didn't know where to begin. Thanks again for your help.