Welcome to Italy Logue, your one-stop Italy travel guide. You'll find whatever you need for your trip to Italy - including Italy hotels and hostels in Italy, as well as tidbits about Italian food and wine, the Italian language, news from Italy, and what makes the Italian culture so special. This is the Italy travel guide for people traveling to Italy or just dreaming about it!
With breathtaking panoramas, aquamarine seas and an endless supply of limoncello, it’s no wonder the Amalfi Coast has long been the vacation destination of choice for the Italian elite. Indeed, the Costiera Amalfitana, as it is called in Italian, has long enraptured visitors with its beauty. Homer imagined it as the home of the alluring Sirens in “The Odyssey,” and writers like E.M. Forster, D.H. Lawrence, John Steinbeck and Virginia Woolf have lived and worked in its hills.
The Amalfi Coast consists of a string of small villages lining the cliffs of the Sorrentine Peninsula, from Positano to Vietri sul Mare. The resort town of Sorrento, further north, is often considered part of the coast and can be a good base from which to explore the area. The legendary islands of the Gulf of Naples – Capri, Ischia and Procida – are also popular destinations.
The coast is most commonly explored by bus, car or the ubiquitous motorino (scooter). The drive is not for the faint of heart. From Positano down, the narrow roads meet the steep cliffline without so much as a road barrier, and Italian motorists have a tendency for speed. If you’re in the driver’s seat, be sure to proceed with caution. Alternately, you can navigate the coast by boat. Ferries and high-speed hydrofoils depart from the main port cities regularly, and prices are reasonable.
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Those of you who have spent any time in Italy this summer fighting crowds, forking over exorbitant fees for gondola rides in Venice, or stood in long Vatican Museum lines may be shocked to hear this, but it’s true - Italy has been dropping steadily in the last few years in terms of popularity as a vacation destination. No matter what statistics you looked at in recent years, France routinely came out on top as the most popular tourist country. Italy almost always ranked second on such lists. But these days, Italy is being outpaced by the likes of Spain, the United States, and even China. So what is Italy doing about it? Why, they’re working on a website, of course.
Of course, in the 21st century the idea of using a website to revitalize a flagging tourism industry isn’t crazy - provided it’s done well. Spain’s excellent tourism website, launched in 2002 with a budget of about €9 million, provides great information for visiting Spain and (rightfully) continues to get millions of visitors every year. There’s no reason Italy couldn’t accomplish the same thing, given how web-savvy many travelers are becoming and how much Italy has to offer. Unfortunately, however, things with Italy’s official tourism website have gone a bit pear-shaped.
You may remember that early last year, Italy’s online tourism portal - italia.it - was launched with great fanfare and a new logo, and both the website and the logo promptly fell flat on their respective faces. The website was fraught with errors, and the logo was - in a word - horrible (that’s the old logo at the top of this post). And this was after the government had already spent five years and more than €45 million on it. What’s more, the website itself was actually shut down this past January.
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My favorite thing to do is travel in Italy - but if I can’t be visiting Italy myself, my next-favorite thing is to help other people travel better in Italy. Toward that end, I’ve put together what I’m calling the perfect 2 week Italy itinerary in this article.
This Italy itinerary is geared toward first-time visitors who want to make sure to see the highlights but may also want a few other options. But in order to make this itinerary for Italy even more broadly applicable, I’ve also listed a few possible alternates for each place in case you want to swap something out, either because you’ve already visited that city or you just have no desire to.
And before you get upset about something I’ve left out or included that makes you think I should get my head checked, be sure to read the caveats at the bottom of the page.
Here’s my suggested two week Italy itinerary - details (and suggested alternatives) are below:
Venice - 2 days
Cinque Terre - 2 days
Florence - 4 days (with a day-trip to Siena)
Rome - 5 days (with a day-trip to Pompeii)
I know not everyone who loves Italy loves Italian soccer (heck, not even all Italians love Italian soccer), but I happen to love both - and I’m really looking forward to the new Serie A season starting up on August 31 (even if my team last season didn’t leave me too optimistic about how things will go this season). I recently posted a primer on how to read an Italian soccer schedule, and I thought I’d take this opportunity to highlight a new feature on a sister site - travel information for Italian soccer stadiums. Because after all, once you figure out when your team is playing, you need to know how to get there to see the game!
You may remember me mentioning the soccer blog The Offside before here on the Italy Travel Guide; well, they’ve recently added a new - and very cool - feature over there where you can look up travel information either by team or by stadium to find out more about where a team plays, where the stadium is in relation to the city, what the nearest airport is, some directions on how to get there, and even some hotels and hostels to check out that are close to the stadium. It’s a fantastic addition, especially for people who are just passing through a city but may want to catch a soccer game while they’re in town.
This list of team travel information and stadium travel information (the pages are different, and it’s worth it to check both) is good for the 2008-2009 Serie A season.
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Semifreddo and gelato are all well and good, but for serious chilling out, Sicilians have another trick up their sleeves - granita! Unlike the icy-confection found elsewhere, Sicilian granita’s intensely pure, crystalline texture is far more divine than anything found off-island.
Other Italian cities tout granita, but typically their goods are sad imitations of the real deal. To begin with, granita in Sicily is not a beverage. It is served in a glass or something akin to an ice cream sundae dish with a spoon, not a straw. There are absolutely no artificial syrups. Fruit flavors are flavored with actual fruit, such as limone (lemon), fragole (strawberries), pesca (peach), and gelsi (mulberries). The tastes are seasonal and in reputable bars you won’t be served mulberry granita until the mulberry tree bears her fruit. However, fresh fruit flavors aren’t the only contenders. Other island favorites include caffé (coffee), mandorla (almond), pistacchio (pistachio), and in Catania, cioccolato (chocolate).
[more]If you’re not interested in paying the high prices for hotels, then chances are good you’re looking at staying in a hostel. Well, if you’re looking for hostels in Florence, here are reviews of the Florence hostels I’ve either stayed in or visited personally. The links go to the detailed posts I’ve done, including photographs, so you can get an idea about which of these hostels in Florence is best for your trip.
Academy Hostel
Emerald Fields
Emerald Palace
Locanda Daniel
Ostello Archi Rossi
Santa Monaca Hostel
Here are a few other Florence hostels you can choose from (I haven’t …
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