Advice on Italy/Tuscany honeymoon

[brazen_irish_hussy]

Since you don''t do europe a lot, there is a way to fly much cheaper if you are willing to sacrafice some convinience.
Take any company into Dublin airport which is much cheaper than most of the major hubs like in london or Germany. Then catch a ryanair flight. Ryanair is the cheapest, most basic airlines you can get, but you can easily get seats for 20-30 euros each. Ryanair doesn''t fly into most major airports so you need to see how far it is from Venice to the airport they use.They fly to an airport that is really close to Rome, it only takes like 10 minutes to get into the city. Ryanair does charge for bags and they charge more if you don''t "buy" space for the bags when you buy the tickets.
If I had known this when I went to Italy I would have saved $1,200 on plane tickets.

 

[Pandora II]

Ryanair flies to Treviso which is the nearest to Venice you can get with a plane!

Then you can get there by airport bus - super easy.


If you want to go and stay in Florence - check out Fiesole which is on the hill above the city. It''s beautiful and has the most amazing views over the city and great hotels (not cheap though.) There''s a famous monastery there which has Gregorian chanting! You can get a bus from Florence up there quite quickly.

It''s where all the chic florentines have their villas - it''s way cooler in the summer than the city.

I''m not a Florence fan, but I do adore Fiesole.

 

[cara]

Went to Italy for honeymoon for 2 weeks in September... thoughts:

The only place we NEEDED a car was Tuscany. It is very rural, surprisingly rural, and you will not be able to get to the small towns without one, even if you have to park the car and walk everywhere once you are in the towns. Since you are concentrating so much time in Tuscany, I would make sure to rent a car for that portion. But you can get away with trains the rest, just be sure to schedule in for the faster trains/Eurostar if you can, so that you woln''t suck up all your time commuting.

We did a day trip to Venice on the last full day (only from Verona) and it was probably our worst decision of the trip. We missed the fast train and spent half the morning on a local train, and it was stressful and crowded once we were there, and we didn''t really have enough time to do it justice. I would go for a least 2 nights or not at all. The eastern influences (gold tile, onion-dome churches) make a nice counterpoint to what you will see in Tuscany region. If you schedule two days, but don''t want to spend both in Venice you could always take a day trip to the countryside - the architecture in Vicenza is impressive, for example, but it will be more pleasant to at least spend two nights in the water city. Plus I''d really like to have seen Venice earlier in the morning, and not in the afternoon crush of humanity.

You definitely need to watch the A/C notation on lodging - many places don''t have it and you will want it! (Or at least make sure that you are prepared to deal with no AC for the "deal" you are getting on price).

Cinque Terre was picturesque and beautiful and all that, but it was also overrun with German tourists. It has been "discovered", and I don''t think there are many people left making livings outside of the tourist industry. The hiking was stunning, packed, and humid, and the water was beautiful but dirty. (Not that Florence and Rome will not also be overrun with tourists, but... for us it was not the relaxing, natural beaching escape that we imagined.)

We also spent a night in Montalpulciano and it was impressive. Fairy tale impressive, and not as packed as some of the other regions. Bought our international travel limit of wine there. (Ignoring that sticker price - those are pesos, right?)

If fact, blissful ignorance of the pricing was a necessary part of the honeymoon. The prices were high for dollars, let alone euros. Many, many repetitions of, "its our honeymoon, right? we woln''t be back for a long while?"