It was while planning for Italy where I first developed by $200/night hotel maximum and my 4-star minimum. At the time, I recall reading somewhere that Italian hotel rooms were generally small and hot. Since we were traveling in August, air conditioning wasn't something we were willing to forgo. We insisted that all of our hotels have a/c with individual controls in the rooms, a breakfast buffet included in the rate, parking available, and a price under $200/night. We stayed in 6 different hotels during our 2 weeks in Italy, and they were all fantastic. As I go through each city, I'll be sure to give them each a shout out.
We flew a perfectly comfortable U.S. Airways flight to Rome. We left in the evening, ate dinner on the plane, and then flew "all night" before arriving in Italia early the next morning. If you're unable to sleep on a plane (I strongly encourage tylenol PM, Unisom or something stronger as necessary so you can at least sleep for a few hours), this first day will be rough because you'll be very tired. Fight the fatigue! The trick to beating jet lag is forcing yourself to stay awake that first day and not plan anything too strenuous. Our goal for the day was to get Euros from the ATM, get our rental car, drive to and tour Pisa, and find our Florence hotel.
I mentioned before that we prefer to not check luggage. In Rome, we each had a small checked bag, and we waited about 2 hours for them after our flight landed. The airport terminal was a mad house and no one could confirm with absolute certainty on which carousel our bags would arrived. Later on that trip we saw on the news that the airport union workers went on strike the morning we arrived causing a major baggage crisis. We suddenly felt very lucky that we "only" had to wait for 2 hours.
After waiting for our bags for 2 hours, we then proceeded to spend the next hour searching for the Enterprise car rental counter. The Rome airport has a main car rental terminal, so naturally we went there first. After failing to find Enterprise, we started asking for help to find it. We literally walked from one end of the airport to the other and back again before we realized that Enterprise outsources their rental cars to a smaller Italian company. When we finally found that smaller company, they didn't have the car we reserved or anything close to the car we needed. Since my husband and the other husband from our party would be sharing the driving, we needed an automatic transmission. Frustrated from losing our first 3 hours of vacation to annoyances and not wanting to waste anymore time, we bit the bullet and decided to use our back up car reservation even though it was a couple hundred $$ more expensive. We arrived at the Hertz counter, got the car we reserved immediately and were on our way before too long in a very nice Mercedes sedan. (Now before you get the wrong idea, you need to understand that most European cars are standard, and that it's only the luxury car makers who offer automatic transmissions for rental cars. We didn't specifically request a luxury brand or in any way could afford to buy a luxury brand in real life, but oftentimes, that's what you get when you rent a car abroad. I don't remember having anything fancy in France or England, but in Ireland we had a BMW, and in Germany we had a Volvo.) I also mentioned this in a previous post, but if you're driving anywhere, you desperately need some sort of GPS device. Smart phones weren't what they are today in 2007, so we had a Garmin helping us with where we were going. Getting out of the Rome airport complex was our biggest challenge, but pretty soon we were on a regular looking highway headed north to Tuscany.
No trip to Italy is complete without a visit to Tuscany. This beautiful, scenic region was certainly one of the highlights of my trip, and somewhere I would most certainly visit again (after I've been everywhere else first, of course). After about 2-3 hours of driving, we arrived in Pisa, home of the famous leaning tower. In order to climb the leaning tower, you need to get tickets in advance for a specific time of day. We did a multi-entry pass which allowed us into the Duomo, Baptistry, and tower that are all right on the same patch of grass. We got our first Italian lunch (pizza) from a little eatery down a side street. We spent a couple of hours touring the Duomo, Baptistry, and climbing the tower. Even if you're not a fan of heights or don't think you necessarily need to see the view from the top of the leaning tower, I encourage you to try it. It's one thing to stand near the tower and get your obligatory photo of you trying to keep it from falling or pushing it over, but climbing the tower really gives you a sense of just how much it leans.
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| Leaning Tower of Pisa |
From Pisa, we drove about another hour to our lovely hotel in Tuscany, The Relais Certosa
We chose this hotel because it not only had all of the aforementioned requirements but also because it offered complementary shuttle service into Florence. Florence has very strict driving laws; only locals, taxis, or other cars with special markings are allowed into the city. A regular rental car from Rome...is not. So we decided to look for a hotel outside of Florence with a convenient way to get in. When we checked in, we inquired about available shuttle times to get into Florence in the morning. The hotel staff informed us that the shuttle was already full for the morning. We were very unhappy about this and explained to the staff that the only reason we chose that hotel was because of the shuttle. They agreed to start the shuttle at 8AM instead of 9AM, so we were able to use it. (2 thumbs up for customer service!) Our first morning in Florence we enjoyed a hearty breakfast of eggs, deli meats, and fruit before starting our first official day in the city that sparked the Italian Renaissance.
Once you're in Florence, you can walk everywhere you want to go. Be prepared for a lot of walking, but the city is beautiful and walking it was so enjoyable. The first thing on our "clip board o' fun" (for you Full House fans) was to see the famous statue of David in the Accademia Gallery. You can get timed tickets in advance, online, which is what we did. Our tickets were for 10AM. Unfortunately, we were there over an hour early since we took the earlier shuttle. Lucky for us, it wasn't a busy day at the Accademia. We acted like we didn't have timed passes, and the lady at the ticket office gave us new tickets for immediate entry.
After touring the Accademia Gallery, we made our way to the Florence Duomo. Up until this point, I'd only ever seen castles in Scotland and Ireland. As incredible as those were, I had no idea what I was about to see when we came up to the Florence Duomo. Few things I've seen since then have been as incredible as that moment when you turn the street corner and see the duomo before you in all it's glory. Even pictures don't do it justice because they don't give you a good representation of its sheer size. This amazing church was build in the 1400s. We joined an English tour, and saw the crypt and the treasury though we decided not to climb the steps to the top of the dome. (We were a little sore from climbing the stairs of Pisa and wanted to pace ourselves). From the Duomo we went to the Santa Croce church. Unlike the Duomo with very few tombs in it, the Santa Croce church was full of them. The entire floor was covered in old tombs (actually very sad given how worn they were from tourists' feet), and famous funerary monuments like Galileo and Michelangelo were on the sides.
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| Funerary Monument of Michelangelo |
The next morning, we got in line about an hour or so before the galleries opened (along with lots of other tourists) for same-day tickets. We spent about 2 hours looking at room after room of religious art. Unless you're a huge art lover, you can skip this place. We went back to our agreed upon shuttle pick-up location, and waited...and waited...and waited. No shuttle. No shuttle?! Now what? We read in travel books before getting there that it was technically illegal to hail a taxi from the street and that you had to go to a taxi stand. The only chance you had of getting taxi outside of a taxi stand was catching one right as another passenger was getting out. We were meeting the other couple at the hotel to check out and leave for Milan, so we didn't want to be late. After waiting longer than we should have, we started heading toward where we thought we could find a taxi stand. As luck would have it, we came upon a passenger leaving a taxi cab, and we grabbed it immediately. The driver spoke great English and new exactly where our hotel was located. (Gained some local notoriety by hosting the Italian soccer team during the World Cup or some other big soccer game a year or two prior.) As soon as we got back to the hotel, the front desk explained that their driver had an emergency and couldn't pick us up. The hotel even tried calling the boutique by where we were standing to tell us to take a taxi, but we had already left by that point. They graciously reimbursed us our cab fare while profusely apologizing.
From our quaint Tuscan hotel, we were headed for downtown Milan, but not without first stopping in a small town called Lucca. If you want a true taste of Tuscany with less of a city feel than Florence, I strongly encourage taking a short detour to Lucca. This town is still surrounded by it's original city walls, with very little street traffic. We only spent the afternoon here and saw some local sites like a beautiful old church, and a religious icon they dubbed "sleeping beauty." But just walking around the streets and enjoying some Italian gelato was enough. Before too long we were back on the highway viewing the rows and rows of grapevines and olives as we drove north.
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| Lucca Duomo |
Thanks for reading!
- Foxy the Traveler
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