Roman Holiday

[Click on each image to get a much larger, clearer view]

We have been waiting for Italy since even before we took our first big trip with children in 2007. We knew we wanted to wait until the children were at the ideal age before going. That ideal age is when our oldest (15 next summer) is still young enough to want to travel with us and our youngest (then 8) is old enough to remember it well into adulthood. Ideally, I think it might be wise to wait another year or two for Joshua to get older. But then again, you never know when Annie's life will get more complicated and she would prefer to stay home with her friends, or for a job, or a camp, or another school-related trip abroad. Who knows what the future will bring. As I mentioned in previous posts, it would also seem wise to take a year off from Europe's millenia-old sights and go somewhere else in order to appreciate them more. But it is hard to say no (or not yet) to such a great place to visit.

This trip could be done any number of ways. I have outlined three here in this post. The first, "Plan A" detailed above, would be the most simple and relaxing (click on the photo to see my red lines better - the little thin red lines imply day trips from a location where we would stay for three to seven nights). This one involves flying into Venice, then traveling west by train to the Cinque Terra (a collection of five cliff side villages only accessible for tourism for the last 30 years or so). Then we would train to a central location near Florence where we would rent a car and spend a week in Tuscany, seeing the small cities of Florence, Pisa, Lucca and Sienna and numerous small Tuscan hilltop villages. We could even spend two weeks here, in two locations - one to the north, where we would spend more time seeing the small cities, and one more to the south, where we would focus on the villages.

Then we would turn in the car and train to Rome, spending a full week in an apartment there. While there, we could take a long day-trip past Naples to Pompeii (a common tourist trek). We would then fly home from Rome.

Plan B would involve seeing more of southern Italy (overlooked by most American tourists) including the island of Sicily. The trip would begin with all the stops of the first option above, but with only a week spent between the cities and towns of Tuscany in favor of an extra week spent in Sicily, making day trips from a cottage rental somewhere centrally located there. We would then have to catch a short flight from Palermo to a more major airport for the flight home.

Plan C would be the most culturally all-inclusive because it would include 7-10 days in Croatia, a place culturally connected to Italy but more like the Italy of 40 years ago - less overrun by tourists and a tad more exotic. The short, but bloody war that took place there 20 years ago is now a faded memory. Most of the damage has been repaired, new borders have separated those who didn't get along and the country is becoming a very welcoming place for slightly more adventuresome tourists. The time for this diversion would come at the expense of seeing Sicily - a fair trade, in my opinion. It would also likely involve a small change in overall itinerary. We would instead begin by flying into Milan and going directly to the Cinque Terra area, getting to Venice at the end of the trip after traveling north through Croatia and through Slovenia. This plan requires us to take a ferry to Dubrovnik across the Adriatic from the less-visited eastern side of Italy.

An alternative that would eliminate the need for the extra distance and the ferry, would be to find a way to start the trip by flying into Dubrovnik and then traveling to Venice and continuing on like plan A, flying home from Rome.

Most major airlines serving Italy and Croatia are significantly more expensive to use than our previous flights. To get a comparable "bargain" airfare that would get us to this corner of Europe will require some creativity. We would either have to use one of the many bargain airlines within Europe to connect from a less expensive major city, or a long train ride from a city like Munich or Paris, which are served by our old friends at IcelandAir.