Spending 2 wks. all around Italy & booked all hotels myself. Is it enough to have a copy of confirmation OR should I email ea. hotel to re-confirm? If so, how far in advance do you suggest I do it?

Thank you SO much for all of your help = the forum and you are AWESOME.

I usually reconfirm a couple of days ahead.

Back in the old days (before booking.com) I'd never reconfirm (unless hotel asked) and I never had a problem. Just bring along a copy of the confirmation and the credit card you booked it with. Hotels charge for a nite or more if you don't show up, so they can hardly give your room to someone else.

It depends.
For hotels I booked using booking engines, I re-confirm if a foul up is impactive. I have had one foul up using hotels.com. I discovered that the target hotel knew nothing about the supposed reservation. The hotels.com help desk continued to claim the hotel should have received the request. Since the prices had gone up since I made a reservation, I insisted that the hotels.com resend the original request. The same class room happened to be still available and I got the same price. If there are other acceptable hotels with availabilities, I would not bother to confirm if the booking engine requests went through. If I bother doing this, I do it around two weeks before: close enough to be credible yet enough time to work out alternatives. The problem represented less than 1% of all the reservations I have made through all channels. I have also found interesting things in the process of re-confirmation such as a "plumbing" problem requiring change in the room which happened to be acceptable to me but not to those with mobility issues.

I do all my own bookings and usually a confirmation e-mail copy is all I have with me. Sure, you can re-confirm if you want to but I doubt it is absolutely necessary. But if it brings peace of mind, why not?