Hello Everyone,
We will be traveling to Italy from Budapest (we live there) in September. We are staying in Venice for a few days and then renting a car on September 18 at Venice Treviso around noon. We return the car at the airport in Bari, Italy one week later to fly home. This is one of many trips we are taking to Italy. We have already visited the Amalfi Coast and the Lake Como area (separately) and we have a trip to Sicily planned for early December. We plan to visit Rome and perhaps Florence in a separate trip next year.

We are pretty experienced travelers but I am looking to do something a bit different for this trip. I would like to enlist your help in coming up with an itinerary that takes us from Venice to Bari by car in 7 days. Our preference would be to base in 2-3 towns and then use the car to visit the surrounding towns. Geographically, it makes sense to me to keep things to the east of the “line” between Florence and Rome.

We definitely do not want to stay in Florence; in fact, we are not sure we even want to visit Florence on this trip since we will return to Italy again. Right now, I think we should skip it and save it to combine with Rome but I am still open minded about it. Instead, we want this trip to be a non-hectic (but active) trip that takes us to some towns that aren’t on the typical tourist itinerary. Of course, the problem with these types of places is that they aren’t necessarily covered in the guidebooks.

So, we need some help from some of you experts who have visited these places! We are in our 40’s and active/healthy so there are no limitations there. We travel on a budget but not a backpacker’s budget. My questions for you are:

Given our parameters, how would you organize this trip?
What 2 (or maybe 3?) towns would you say we should use as a base and what places would you say that we need to make sure we visit from those bases?
Do you have a special/favorite hotel, BNB or agriturismo that you would recommend?
What are your “must-see” places in central to eastern Italy?

I want to thank you in advance for your help and we are looking forward to hearing your ideas!
Ben and Amy

You might consider Matera for at least 2, and maybe 3 nights. You have a number of lodging options there; I was pleased with the Locanda di San Martin, which still seems to get very good reviews:
http://www.locandadisanmartino.it

Perhaps I am the only one who is not quite clear, but:

Is your trip 10 days total? 3 days in Venice + 7 days other places, flying home from Bari?

If so, do you wish to go south of Bari?

Italy is so varied, you should describe something of your interests other than getting off the beaten track. Ravenna is hugely different from Urbino, Ascoli Piceno is completely different from Rimini, etc etc. Are you mainly intersted in art, farms, food, mountains, Fellini, motorcycles, walled towns, bird watching, wine, history -- ???

I was actually composing a very similar response, but I accidentally closed the browser tab.

There are many very interesting and beautiful places to stop over in Emilia-Romagna, Le Marche, and Abruzzo, before you even get to Puglia, the region where Bari is located. In order to trim the list a bit, it would really help to know more about your interests, and also about the sorts of places you dislike.

Matera is south of Bari, so it wouldn't be a stopover on the way from Venice.

@sandralist....yes, our trip is 10 full days with 3.5 in Venice and 7 days to travel from Venice to Bari.

All,

Our interests are quite varied but they generally revolve around history, historical sites, and culture. So, when we visit a place we like to get a feel for where people came from, how they got here, and what their lives are like now. Of course, you can't get a full feel for this in a short visit but we tend to gravitate towards museums and sites that help to illustrate and provide context related to the culture of an area. We do like to hike and walk and we love to explore local foods and wines. We prefer "real" towns to those that are pretty much 100% tourist towns but there are some "tourist towns" like Rothenburg, Germany and Bruges, Belgium that we did enjoy. My wife is especially partial to towns that have great pedestrian zones.

I fully understand that we could literally spend 6 months exploring the area we are talking about and still not see everything there is to see;that is exactly why I am looking for some help in narrowing it down.

Let's stay north of Bari.

Thanks again for the help!

"Matera is south of Bari" -- right, by an hour.

Given your interests, two cities I can highly recommend are Ravenna and Urbino.

Ravenna was an important capital of the Ostrogoth kingdom in Italy, after the fall of the Roman Empire, and later a Byzantine capital when the Eastern Roman Empire, based in Constantinople, re-established a foothold in Italy. There are some marvelous churches from this period, with splendid mosaic decorations. Most (maybe all?) of these belonged to the Arian branch of Christianity, later declared heretical.

Urbino was an important Renaissance capital. There is a beautiful ducal palace there, one of the best preserved in Italy, which now houses an art museum with some excellent pieces in the collection, including the Ideal City, by an anonymous artist, and considered one of the iconic Renaissance works of art.

Another beautiful Renaissance city in Le Marche is Camerino, which is really off the beaten track. The entire area is beautiful and unspoiled by mass tourism.

I haven't seen a lot of Abruzzo, but we really liked the town of Sulmona. Aquila is also a beautiful city, but I haven't been back since the devastating earthquake in 2009. I've read that the reconstruction has been extremely slow.

Near Pescara, you can visit Castel del Monte, a lovely early medieval castle built by the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II. Its very simple and harmonious construction makes it one of the most beautiful medieval buildings I've seen.

Ravenna has a nice historic center for strolls (as well as its spectacular mosaics) but Brisighella is nice too if you would prefer a smaller town. It's 40 minutes from Ravenna, so a daytrip to Ravenna is very doable, and Brisighella makes a nice base for day trips to other towns of interest.

If you are flying out of Bari, you need to move further south than Urbino to make the last leg of your trip something other than a driving slog just to catch that plane. I think what I might do is leave Ravenna and drive to Ascoli Piceno for an overnight, then drive the next day to Trani, and use that for the other "base".

So:

3 days Venice
3 days Ravenna area
1 night Ascoli Piceno
3 nights Trani

@bvlenci and @sandralist....these are great suggestions and very helpful! It looks like Ravenna is a definite so I just have to make a decision on the second stop based upon the pros and the cons as discussed. Thanks so much for taking the time to help us out!

Re: Trani -- I loved Trani! That said, I didn't consider suggesting it because I had assumed that you weren't trying to visit Puglia on this trip. And since Trani is close to Bari (just over 1/2 hour, I think), I personally wouldn't base in both without a really good reason.

Do you want to include Puglia in this trip? I was under the impression that you did not -- that you were "just" planning to leave from Bari. If you ARE trying to see Puglia on this trip, then I would suggest an entirely different "plan of attack."

Let us know!

@kja you are correct that my thought was that I would just leave from Bari as opposed to trying to visit Puglia. However, that said, I really am open to any ideas.

I like Ravenna because, in addition to it being worth a stand-alone visit, it looks like I can base out of there and fan out a bit.

If you think Urbino is too far north, Ascoli Piceno would be several hours further south, and would be a good base if you'd enjoy mountain hikes and tiny picturesque villages. Sulmona, even further south would provide similar experiences.

However, for art and culture, Urbino is ideal. In addition to the museum in the Ducal Palace, which I've already mentioned, there are many ancient Roman remains along the route of the ancient Via Flaminia; there is a very rare ancient Roman gilded bonze equestrian statue group in a small civic museum in the town of Pergola. There are medieval castles Android monasteries, and medieval walled towns. And truly lovely countryside. I may be slightly biased, because I live near there.

I like Urbino, and there are many nearby towns I like as well, but I saw everything there is of cultural interest in Urbino itself in less than a day, and the truth is that Italy is filled with such marvelous "ideal" small cities, north and south, also surrounded by smaller towns with treasures and charm.

By all means make Urbino your 2d base if you don't mind spending most of the last 2 days of your 10 day stay driving to Bari. But don't think you are missing the "best" if you do make one of your bases further south and visit Urbino on another trip. There are loads of wonderful areas between Ravenna and Bari with ancient Roman remains, fascinating art and culture, and great food.

This is great info everyone!