Italy Itinerary - Venice
Our trip to Italy was over two years in the making. We originally had flights scheduled for 2020, but those obviously got canceled. Planning the trip was really difficult. I’d spent about a month in Italy in college, and had some places I knew I would love to go back to. There’s also the big cities you can’t miss, and the places our friends had visited that looked amazing. We decided that we would travel around some of the northern half of Italy, saving the northern lakes and the Dolomites for a future trip, and everything south of Rome for a third trip. There was just too much to stuff into our 12 days in Italy. We ended up moving around a lot, which works for us. I would obviously love to have more time in each place, but our goal was to get a taste of each city, then put our favorites on a mental list called “we need to come back here” (this list is getting quite extensive).
I want to share our itinerary with you, and what we did in each city so that you can follow along with me and understand my love for Italy. In order to do that and not make this one gigantic blog post, I’m going to split it up city by city, but I will include the overall itinerary at the bottom of the post so you can follow along with how we got from place to place.
DAY ONE
Our first stop was Venice. We had taken a red eye flight from Dulles to Brussels, and then flew from Brussels to Venice and got in around noon. The airport for Venice is about 4 miles north of the city. We hopped on the local bus and took that to the vaporetto (which functions the same as a bus but it’s a boat) to our hotel. The vaporetto is a really great way to get into Venice, because it’s a cheap but beautiful boat ride along the Grand Canal, and stops in many places. We hopped off on the stop near our hotel, and walked a couple of blocks until we got there.
We checked in and immediately headed out for food and coffee, which are not hard things to find in Italy. Right around the corner, we found a little place that served cichette (basically Venice’s version of tea sandwiches) and espresso. These are two things you should definitely try while you’re in Venice, but there are also things you should know. Not all cichette are made equal. Some were incredible while others tasted like stinky fish. Cicette are unique to Venice, so we had to try a bunch of them.
As for the coffee, Italians have lots of rules. If you order a coffee (“Vorrei un cafe per favore”), you’re going to be given a shot of espresso, not a drip coffee. If you want a big cup of coffee, they’re basically just going to add water to your espresso, so you should just order espresso anyway. They also will give you spoon and some sugar, because they expect you to add some sugar into your coffee. For people like Niko who are bougie third wave coffee people, this is heresy. He refused to add sugar to his coffee and then couldn’t stop complaining how bad the coffee in Italy was. It is bitter, and they expect you to add sugar to it. If you do, it tastes great, so just add the sugar. Also, if you order a coffee and stand at the bar and drink it, they will charge you less than if you sit at a table and order it. Italians generally don’t take coffee to-go, they’ll take the time to drink it on the spot. You can also order a cappuccino or macchiato, but don’t order this after lunch if you don’t want to be judged. They don’t order drinks with milk in them after lunch because something about milk and your stomach…? I’m not actually sure. Just don’t do it. I’ll end my rant on Italian coffee there.
Our goal on the first day after a red eye flight is to make it as long as we can without needing a nap, but we were both exhausted so we headed back to the hotel for a short nap. After showering and getting ready, we headed out for a light dinner and then passed out by 9:30.
DAY TWO
One of our favorite travel hacks is trying at hotels that have breakfast included. Our hotel, Savoia & Jolanda, had a great breakfast. We ate a ton and then grabbed some fruit to take with us so we wouldn’t have to pay for a big lunch. We downloaded a walking tour, and went around the city hitting up all the major sites on our own, reading the descriptions on our phone (another great travel hack if you don’t want to pay for a tour & want to explore on your own terms).
My favorite area this walking tour took us to was Campo Santa Margherita. It is a big open square in Venice that is surrounded by shops and restaurants. This area felt so much more authentic than the areas near hot spots like Piazza San Marco. We found ourselves mostly surrounded by Italians, and I had to speak to the waitress in Italian when we sat down for afternoon snacks and drinks at a restaurant because she didn’t speak English. These are my favorite places to find when traveling, because then I feel like I’m actually experiencing true culture.
Winding our way through the city, we stumbled on the coolest little book store I’ve ever been in. It is called Liberia Acqua Alta and is filled with all kinds of books to buy, but also has hundreds of books stacked up around as decorations. There’s a bunch of different nooks to explore within the shop. I could have spent hours wandering around this store. I left with a book of watercolor paintings of Venice, with French captions. I don’t know French, but the pictures were too beautiful to pass up.
Afterwards, we walked over to the Peggy Guggenheim museum but it had a huge line and tickets were sold out (this is why you should buy in advance). Niko was still feeling the jet lag, so he headed back to the room for a quick nap. I was too excited to sleep, so I walked around some shops. I ended up in an art/vintage store and talked to the shop owner for a long time in a mix of Italian and English (because my Italian isn’t good enough for full conversations yet). He told me about how his great grandfather, father, and son were all artists. We talked all about Italy and he wrote down a lot of recommendations for off-the-beaten-path places to visit in an old pamphlet with pictures of his father’s paintings in it. He was so excited to talk to me about art, and I loved getting to hear what he had to say. Talking to the locals is another one of my favorite things about traveling.
I met Niko back at the hotel and we changed for dinner, but it was still early so we walked over to the Jewish ghetto area of town. It was cool yo see such a significant area, but everything had pretty much closed down and there was nothing to do. Since we had some time to kill, we decided to do the most touristy thing possible and take a gondola ride. I generally feel like experiences like this are overrated, but this was amazing. We got an older gondolier, and he sang Italian songs to us during the whole ride and it felt like we were in a movie.
At dinner time, we found a restaurant alongside a small canal and we ordered seafood and dishes typical of Venice - things like so risotto with cuttlefish and smoked local cheese. Sometimes people think of Italian food as all one thing, but the different regions of Italy actually have different specialties (Stanley Tucci’s Discovering Italy TV show does a great job exploring these!). We made it our goal to try different foods at each city we stopped in.
After dinner, we walked along the streets, admiring the glittering lights reflected off the canals and enjoying the peacefulness of the city. The following day we were traveling to a new city, so we said our goodbyes to Venice.
ITALY TRIP OVERVIEW:
DAY 0: Red eye flight
DAY 1: Land in in Venice at 11:55AM, spend the day in Venice
DAY 2: Venice
DAY 3: Travel to Cinque Terre
DAY 4: Cinque Terre
DAY 5: Cinque Terre
DAY 6: Travel to Florence
DAY 7: Florence
DAY 8: Florence
DAY 9: Travel to Siena
DAY 10: Siena/Tuscany day tour
DAY 11: Travel to Rome
DAY 12: Rome (& Vatican)
DAY 13: Rome
DAY 14: Fly home