Italo in April
 

Is April a good time of year to visit Italy? Which área do you recomend for a 2week road trip? Tuscany? Amalfi?

Amalfi is NOT a good place for a road trip (one narrow coast road to get anywhere - although you can visit Pompeii and Naples form there. But very few hotels have parking and finding a place to park on the street is a major PIA (unless you are a NYer used to driving around for 20 minute to find a minute place to squash a car). And April is too early in the year for a beach resort. Ferries will I think still be less frequent and the water is definitely too cold to go in.

Tuscany should be fine - nice spring grass and flowers - visiting a bunch of hill towns. But do realize that the center of most cities and towns are pedestrian only - and you have to park outside and walk in (or take a shuttle bus or?) or face very expensive traffic tickets.

Hey how about Umbria? Here are our pics from an April 6-day trip, and there are half a dozen places we still wish we'd seen!

https://www.flickr.com/photos/dougla...7632254170980/

If you're looking for a two week trip with a car, you might want to stretch your time over more than one region, or, if you're slow travelers, I guess one region could fill up two weeks.

We went to Umbria in late April one year and had a very good time. We didn't have as much time as you do, but if we had, I might have added Le Marche or parts of Tuscany.

Tuscany and Umbria, or Umbria and Le Marche, would be wonderful.

I don't mean to make it sound like you couldn't fill up two weeks in any of these places; you certainly could fill months if you had them.

What are your interests? We like art, history and nature, and are drawn to Tuscany and Umbria as places that are full of both.

What do you want to do? Have you been to Italy before?

"Is April a good time of year to visit Italy?" I personally would avoid Easter weekend.

If you're only considering a road trip, see if Sicily interests you. Tuscany and/or Umbria are easy if you're thinking of seeing a combo of big cities and small towns.

Florence is the only "big" city in Tuscany that any tourists ever visit, and even Florence is only about the size of Wichita, Kansas, or Bristol in the UK. Umbria and Le Marche really have no big cities.

You haven't mentioned if you've been anywhere in Italy on previous trips.

If you're flying into one of the Big Three (Rome, Venice, Florence/Pisa), you may want to see some of the city before/after you drive around the countryside. You could also make different cities the "bookends" to your driving trip. Fly into Venice or Florence/Pisa and spend a couple of days acclimating. Drive around Tuscany and/or Umbria and end with a couple of days in Rome before flying home.