Hi,

I am going to Italy in March to pick up my daughter, who has been there (mostly in 4 different cities in northern Italy) for the past 18 months.

We will be there for only 6 days and intend to see several places (I know, I know, cut some out...we might end up doing that.).

I have a couple of questions:

1. We will be leaving from Malpensa airport. Do they have any type of secure storage facility we can use to hold some of my daughter's stuff while we are traveling for a few days? Or does a train station? We really would rather not shlep it all over northern Italy with us if we can help it...Oh, and we plan to travel by train the most, if that helps.

2. How critical is it for us to have reservations for lodging? We are leaning toward less-expensive hotels or even hostels. Anyone have any experience with this method? I am not sure where we will be when, so I hesitate to make reservations unless I really need to....or maybe we should make them for just some of the nights?

Guess those are the two most critical "burning questions" for now...

Will wait for input. (Please don't tell us to scale back our plans...we already know we will probably need to do that...and my questions would be the same, regardless.)

K.

Hi Z,

There is a left luggage office at Milano Centrale trai station.

You can find it at http://www.milanocentrale.it/indexf.cfm

Click "Station today"

IMO, the smaller the price for a room, the more important it is to reserve ahead.

The best cheap rooms go very quickly, as there aren't that many of them. You could get stuck with something fairly awful.

I would AT LEAST compile a list of preferred lodgings and take the phone numbers with me.

Then again, I'm not very adventurous when it comes to hotel rooms. I always want the most I can get for the smallest amount of money, and I'm not willing to sleep in places that aren't clean, fairly quiet, well located, and have honest management.

That's why I said this is my opinion.

Except for Milan itself, I don't think you need reservations in March -- unless you plan to go to other major cities. Of particular difficulty is a place like Bologna, which holds lots of trade fairs. Or, needless to say, Venice.

But you should nonetheless do research and pick your ideal hotels. If you get there and they are booked, they will be able to direct you to a similar hotel of a similar class, and their reputation (and your possible return business) will be on the line.

Otherwise, you will have to rely on the tourist office (often closed) or will end up choosing hotels based on their proximity to the train station, and the streets around a train station very often (not always, but often) have the worst budget hotels in town.

Because of security reasons, I don't think airports store luggage anymore. Milano Centrale is the best bet.

Hi Zookeeper,

Let me make a suggestion. Since you plan to cover a lot of ground in a very short amount of time - PLAN, PLAN, PLAN! Why waste time trying arrange and find lodging on your trip? Do it now. It will take longer than you think once you are in a city.

Get your train schedules and know which ones to take between cities that are the fastest. It can make a huge difference. Why show up at the station only to find that if you had been 10 minutes earlier you could have taken the ES to Venice in half the time the IC will take?

Know in advance what days the museums you want to see are closed and their hours, etc. I can't tell you how many trip reports I've read here from people who show up at the Vatican to see the Sistine Chapel only to find out it's closed for a holiday or some other reason. How disappointing!

When your time on vacation is short, it takes planning to make the most of your trip.

Buon viaggio!

My first trip to Europe, which I took right after graduating from college and right before the web was a useful phenomenon, we went with no reservations and just showed up and found cheap rooms. We tended to move rooms every couple days, in part because of availability issues and in part out of some misguided sense that we should stay in different parts of a city to get the full experience. Finding rooms in this way worked okay (in summer in Spain 11 years ago--no idea if that is indicative of how likely it is to work in Italy in March today), but I found it all fairly stressful. Much depends on your own stomach for spontananeity and risk-taking, but it seems to me the web is a wonderful innovation for making these sorts of low-budget trips much easier. If you don't think you would find the uncertainty and the possibility of having to check a few places before you find one to bother you, though, I would imagine it can be done.

It doesn't look to me like zookeeper08 isn't planning. The problem is not wanting to make hotel reservations without being sure they are going to be used.

And I think flexibility is great. Last autumn, against my better instincts, I booked all my hotel rooms in advance in Le Marche -- and it was totally unnecessary. At least once I really wished I had not felt obliged to press on to my next location because I had a hotel reservation there. By contrast, I spent a glorious week driving in the Ligurian hills between Genoa and France, and when I came across a little town I liked, I'd find a restaurant with rooms above it and eat and sleep there for as long as I liked. I usually ended up spending about 60 euro for a double, and the rooms were sweet and spotless, and often had fantastic views. (That's much harder to find if you travel only by train.)

I'm taking a trip to Texas soon and I'm only booking about a third of my reservations in advance.

Wow! The comments from others are truly helpful! I've been reading and searching this place for answers for a couple of weeks now, and learned so much! Now, in case someone knows of good priced places to stay, the places we plan to go are: Milan, Genoa, Pisa, Florence, Modena, Venice, Bergamo, Como and up to Zollikofen in Switzerland. We won't be staying overnight in all those places...and in a couple of them my daughter has friends where we can stay. Any suggestions of low-priced places (but safe) to sleep? We don't plan to spend much time in the room! And does anyone have any experience with staying in hostels?

I am getting excited about this trip!

K.

Prepare for the wrath of the advisors pointing out that your schedule is way too full. I will leave that browbeating to others and simply say I liked the Hotel Desiree in Florence. Their website currently says 65 euros for a double. www.desireehotel.com

emnyc,

that hotel looks wonderful! Thanks for the suggestion!

Now, any ideas about security? Can I assume that if we leave our things in a room at a hotel or hostel they will be safe? And we can just take a light backpack and a bit of money for the day?

And do I need to carry my passport at all times, or just a copy of it?

Sorry, this is all so new to me.

K.

Hi Z,

>Can I assume that if we leave our things in a room at a hotel or hostel they will be safe? <

YOu can, but you would be wrong.

>...do I need to carry my passport at all times, or just a copy of it? <

A copy is usually sufficient.

Are you going to leave your passport in your hostel room along with your other valuables? A copy won't get you back home.

You will absolutely have to reserve in Milan ahead of time, and it is very hard to find a cheap room in Milan. If you can possibly move out of Milan your first night, do it.

But if you must stay in Milan, I suggest looking at the website of Holiday City and if you see a location and price you like, look up the name of the hotel on Tripadvisor. If you see bad reviews or no reviews, don't book it.

Genoa will not be at its best in March. It's really a warm weather town.

You might want to get out of Northern Italy altogether, which isn't your best weather bet in March. Perhaps you should just focus on Firenze and Pisa (which can be done as a day trip from Firenze). You'll have plenty to do, believe me!

Stop! zookeeper is going to NORTHERN Italy, and security is certainly no issue there, except for Genova (and partly Milano). These two are not the safest places on earth, especially not Genova which has somehow the flair of southern Italy in these respects; but for the rest of the destinations, you don't need to have any worries about the safety of your things in hotel rooms. After all, you're not going to Naples!!

Just as with the question of whether to reserve ahead of time, different people have different risk tolerances in regard to locking up valuables. Despite my need for reservations to feel comfortable, I carry my passport with me and don't worry about leaving things in my hotel room like my camera. (Can't think of what else I have that is arguably valuable.) In fact, I haven't ever used a hotel safe except once in St Kitts where I was lucky enough to win a lot of cash at a casino. But some strongly disagree with this approach.

I ended up consoling a woman in Florian's in Piazza San Marco who had just had her purse snatched. Over dinner than night in a different part of town, a woman told me about how she had snatched her purse back from a thief that day in Venice. And this was in December, not August.

I mention these stories to say that even in Northern Europe, there are professional pickpockets and thieves, and they especially operate in the areas where tourists are most likely to be abundance.

What is truly valuable when you are traveling is your passport and travel tickets. Anything else that gets stolen is just a minor nuisance, but those are very important. My policy is to keep everything locked in the hotel safe (especially since the hotel usually takes your passport away from you anyway for several hours) and if that's not possible, I'd wrap it to my person under my clothes.

I travel to Italy every week for work and would like to add a few things for you to consider. Your passport MUST be physically presented to any hostel or hotel in Italy upon check-in in order for them to turn over information to the police. I never travel without my passport on me-usually in one of those "lovely" beige" money belts under my blouse or sweater. March is also the time that most of the Midwest in the states is out for spring break and traveling overseas (even to Milan and northern Italy) is going to start becoming crowded. Also, when my son studied in Torino two years ago-he mentioned that alot of those hostels and hotels up near the alps and lake area are shut down because of seasonal restrictions.You don't have to have everything over scheduled but I would have the first and last nights figured out before you go. Its very hard once you are over there to start getting reservations without help as the internet and your own phone service is so much easier to deal with.Lastly, Florence is just as bad for pickpockets and problems as Rome.

Pickpockets yes, that's possible - of course in Florence, but even in Venice (though only if you are behaving really, really naive as a tourist). But we were talking about hotel room safety, and that's a completely different issue. Hotel rooms are safe, even without a hotel safe.

franco,

I really don't think that is fair to the victims of the pickpockets in Venice. The professional thieves in Venice are very good at what they do. It's rather silly to tell a petite woman or older woman it's naive to think she can walk in Piazza San Marco without getting her purse snatched -- which is what happened to two different women I know at two different times.

I think it's naive to think a hotel room in Italy is always safe from theft.

Being aware of the risks hasn't stopped millions of people from flocking to Italy, and more just keep coming! It's sad that there are these pros, but they do exist.

Well just a couple of weeks ago there was an article about citizen residents of Venice that have banded together to be the "eye" for the police in order to catch pickpockets. In fact the article was posted by here by one of our Fodorites but unfortantly I don't remember who it was.

Even in the small city in the region of Veneto (which is in NE Italy) where I stay a good part of the time when I am in Italy, there is problems now. This is not a rascist remark but unfortantly people from other countries are causing problems (understand mostly illegal immigrants)..one does not relax and put their purse on a chair next to them at a cafe table as one could years ago for example. And there was a woman that somehow got into my friends house (which starts on the 2nd floor (3rd floor to Americans) and made it up to the 4floor (5th floor to Americans) where my bedroom suite was. I had my passport, various pieces of jewelry etc. laying on the dresser. Fortunatly my friend heard some strange noises and investigaged and chased the woman all the way to the street. And very fortuantly my dear friend was not hurt by this intruder and nothing of mine or anything in the house was taken.

So just because you are in N Italy it does not mean it is crime free.

Oh, I had friends that lived on the outskirts of Asolo. When I stayed with them I was asked not to take a walk by myself on the country lanes as it was not safe to do so. Again, this was because of illegal immigrants that were in the area and various "problems" that had arose because of them.

As bad as Naple, no. But certainly one has to properly take care of their belongings and be aware of their surrondings.

I must point out that the same explanation for thievery exists in Spain, where the problem is blamed on immigrants, especially from South America. This has actually prevented the police from solving a lot of the problem in Spain, since a lot of the professional thievery that preys on tourists is organized by Spaniards, just as it is by Italians in Italy, Brits in London, Hollanders in the Netherlands, and Canadians in Canada -- not to mention New Yorkers in New York.

Tourists carry things of value -- Cameras, passports, air tickets, credit cards, too much cash -- and they are in a state of confusion a lot of the time. It makes them easy marks. Every culture produces people with sticky fingers, north and south.