The View from a Drawbridge

Dear Reader, ever since I started blogging about our wonderful trip to Italy and the amount of research and planning I put into it, I’ve gotten multiple requests from friends for my itinerary. Given that I did spend six months working on it, and since I’ve been to 23 countries in my life, I think I’ve put together a very comprehensive package. I’m quite proud of it.

I suppose I could charge for this kind of service, but I’m more than happy to share it freely with anyone who asks. There’s no point in making you recreate the wheel, after all. It was the trip of a lifetime for me. It would do my heart good to think that someone else used all or even part of my plans and enjoyed it just as much, or even that they went to one place I mentioned that they wouldn’t have heard about or visited otherwise.

So, let me tell you the basics about the trip, and if you’re still intrigued, click on the downloadable excel spreadsheet below that spells it all out day by day. I’ve even thrown in some basic vocabulary, lists of venues that you definitely should book in advance, and some notes and advice for good measure.

• For starters, it was actually only a 13 day trip. I used the 14th day to chill out at home and get back into my time zone. So sue me.
• The cities we visited were Venice, Florence, Assisi, Spello, Preci, Casteluccio, Sant’Agnello, Sorrento, Pompeii, Amalfi, Atrani, Herculaneum, and Rome. I know that sounds like a lot for that time frame, but many of those visits were only for a few hours.
• We took a train from Venice to Florence, then on our last day in Florence we rented a car and dropped it off on our first day in Rome, so we had it for 5 days.
• We stayed primarily at AirBnBs so that we’d at least have a kitchenette. We saved a lot of money by making some of our meals ourselves.
• This was by no means a 5-star trip, but it wasn’t a budgetary backpacker trip, either. I had been saving up for the trip for decades. The entire thing cost us, 2 people, from Seattle, all inclusive, a grand total of $14,000.00 US (plus an additional $1,000.00 for a dog/house sitter) and this was in May, 2025. But…
• There are definitely ways for you to reduce those costs. I would have been perfectly content staying in private rooms in hostels. I’m not opposed to sharing a bathroom down the hall. Dear Husband didn’t want that full European travel experience, though. There might have been camping options, too, but we did not look into that. We also could have eaten out less. And if we had not rented the car, we’d have saved quite a bit, but it would have been much more difficult and time consuming to visit Assisi, Spello, Preci, Casteluccio, and Herculaneum.
• DH and I are very much into museums and art, so we spent a lot on admission fees. If you prefer spending your time lounging on the beach or hiking in the countryside, or shopping ’til you drop, this itinerary may not be for you. (But the lounging and the hiking would have reduced costs as well.)

About the Spreadsheet:

• When you download this spreadsheet, you’ll discover that is is an excel file and it has 16 tabs. Three tabs are informational, and the rest has the itinerary laid out day by day.
• You’ll notice that, of the latter, each have numbers and it doesn’t start with number 1. Don’t worry, you’re not missing anything. I just numbered them based on the calendar date we would be on when we were doing the things listed.
• You do have my permission to share this with anyone you see fit. Just please give me and my blog the credit, and please do not financially profit from it.
• Some of the venues I describe are rather obscure. If you have trouble finding anything about them, do a search in my blog, as I do intend to blog about all the most significant aspects of the trip sooner or later.
• If you have any questions, feel free to contact me.

If you do decide to use this itinerary in whole or in part, I hope you enjoy it. Having said that, though, I can’t be held responsible for any vacation SNAFUs that may crop up. Venues may change over time. You may not enjoy places as much as we did. Travel, by its very nature, can be unpredictable. I’m assuming you are a grown up and have chosen to take my advice of your own free will, with the understanding that I’m not a travel professional or an expert on all things Italy.

If you’re interested in what I did to plan this trip, which includes step by step instructions that will work for any trip you care to plan, I wrote a blog post about that, and you can see it here. You might also benefit from my blog post entitled The Only Packing List You’ll Ever Need.

But if you do enjoy yourself, I’d love to hear about it in the comments below. And if you really want to thank me, tell your friends about this blog. That would mean a great deal to me. Whatever you decide to do, have a wonderful trip! I’m so stinkin’ jealous!

Without further ado, here’s the itinerary. Bon Voyage.