Trip to Italy, Part 1--Bologna, Venice, Parma

Me? How many times have I been to Italy? Just the once. I hope to return after I get out of Pet Debt.

This is exactly what I was thinking. You should have seen how many cities I wanted to visit originally! It's tough having to cross cities off the list, especially when I think that it's all because of this f*cking job that I hate anyways.

Yeah, you littlek. How long were you there? Did you focus on mostly the smaller towns then? How the hell did you narrow it down? It's killing me!

But you'll go again, you know it. And the experiences layer.

My problem is I keep wanting to go back to where I loved and there is a near infinite amount to see other than the places I've been. I still haven't been south.

Have you ever seen Bell'italia magazine? I took it for about five years in italian (have seen it recently in english, pffft.) Or maybe the magazine has changed. Anyway, they feature several places each issue, giving amazing cross sections of buildings or areas and drawings of the places at different times (or they used to), and extremely good descriptions of the history, etc. of a place, with gorgeous photography... and it used to drive me nuts, each issue was full of places I'd never seen..

Littlek, if I ever make it back to Lucca, I will definitely go see Barga.

Bell'Italia. Check. Sounds like a good resource.

I didn't narrow anything down, I just went with the flow. We stayed at my cousins house and they packed me and my sister into a car and drove us around on day-trips. I'm not sure how much planning my sister did, but she did do some. We went to a olive oil fattoria and tasted and bought olive oil (you're allowed toreturn with 3 litres per person (I think). We visited an ex-coworker of hers who worked on a fattoria (stunning, idealic, sun-soaked farm).

I was there for 10 days or so. We did visit Florence, Lucca and Pisa, Florence being a bigger city, I think than the other two.

The tourism in Florence was almost stiffling to me in April. We saw the garden and the plazza, but the line for the art museum was around the block. Ponte Vechio is cool to see and the throngs seem to fit there, for some reason.

We stopped in Pisa just to see the leaning tour and the other two tourist traps there (which were actually very cool).

Lucca we defintely didn't spend enough time in. We didn't take in much of anything except a farmers market of sorts. We didn't even see the Volta Santo or the arboreatum.

I adored Barga, I loved the fatorria, siena and assisi just about crackled with history. I didn't want toleave the rustico the family had up on the hill (which didn't even have electricity). I kept wanting to go back up into the foothills to the little villages on the little rivers, the tiny ristoranti in every little tiny town.

Sorry, I'm sure my spelling is atrocious. Too tired to look words up.

It's your trip, Kicky, first figure out what your really want to see. Ruins? Volcanoes? Islands? Modern cities? Old cities? Ancient cities? Farms? Olive groves?

I want to see and experience "la dolce vita." Ha!

um, define the dolce vita?

I guess I just mean I want to see how the Italians live. I know, that's a pretty nebulous thing.

What I'd really like to do is sit in a little cafe in some piazza somewhere and watch the people go by, forget about the rest of the world for a while, and just soak in the people, the language, the life. I know it sounds pretty goofy and dreamer-ish, but that is really the one thing I'd love to be able to do. Just to be at peace, in Italy, and think about life. Yes, I am a kook like that.

I'm still researching the other stuff. I'll figure it out soon enough.

Kicky, that's what Iwanted todo when I was there, but I only got about 1 hour of that (one time near the Ponte Vecchio) in the whole 9-10 days I was there.

That's my favorite thing too. One of the times in Siena, with my then husband, we spent most of two days on the piazza, the Campo. We'd go check out the Pinacoteca (museum) and go back to the piazza. Go check out the duomo, and go back to the piazza. That piazza has had such a life. I know a lot about it now, from later research, but also from just sitting there watching, eating pizza, having wine. Having just a bottle of aqua mineral con gas. Having a snack later, some more wine. I've been there in near dawn with only one person in it, in later morning with people walking their dogs, mostly locals, in the afternoon with scads of tourists and still visible locals (the tourists are really the visible ones). I've never been to the palio race there (the 90 second horse race), but have a lot of pictures of it.

One night we were sitting in the piazza around, say, 7:30, and the place was really emptying out. We decided to go back to our room back up by San Domenico. But.. the street was clogged, it was passeggiata, my first experience of it. It seemed the whole town was out walking and talking. It lasted about an hour. Then the thick throng dissolved, people went home for dinner.

I've been back there since, and walked most of the city. Still love it, still love the Campo.

My other favorite thing is just walking and walking, wherever I am, and stopping along the way...say at the corner alimentaria in Arezzo where we got roast pork sandwiches from a just out of the oven very large roast (sorry, lilK) and some wrapped up fried artichokes and found a bench to eat them a block away; walking through Rome for days on end, finding I would almost always work it out so I could walk in and out of the Pantheon if only for a minute, sometimes twice a day. Maybe you won't feel that way about the Pantheon, or the Campo in Siena, but you'll find your places to be there.

No problem, osso! You reminded me that while we were in Assisi, there was a tent with fresh mozzerella and ricotto - the sellers were handing out plate-fulls of cheese.

Milan vs. Bologna.

Milano is, by far, more attractive to the tourist, IMO.
You have the very impressive Duomo, the Palazzo Ducale, the "Last Supper" fresco, a chance to go to La Scala, the Brera Museum (only worth it for "Il Bacio", IMHO) and many good shops and boutiques, in which you can buy designer clothes.

Bologna has the beautiful Piazza Maggiore, the University zone, the slanted towers, it's real nice to walk under the portici and it's probably a nicer place to live in. But no comparison in tourist terms.

I disagree with littlek, when she says all big cities are somewhat the same. Not at all, and specially in Italy. But I agree with the core of her argument: the best of Italy, in all terms, is in the smaller cities and towns.

Osso wrote about the Palio di Siena, the most famous one. But others are just as fun and impressive.
I was lucky enough to find one at Pistoia: knights reppresenting each of the 4 boroughs horseraced to hit a target with their poles. Unforgettable.

In Ferrara there's a Palio in May. On the second Saturday, there's a flag wavers' competition; on the third Saturday a "historical" march through the city; on the last Sunday the Palio proper: 4 riding competitions: boys, girls, dunkey rides and the true Palio, horsemen ride four laps. All this in medieval costumes and setting.





I don't know whose turn is it this year to play local, but you may catch the Old Sea Republics Regatta, in which Amalfi, Pisa, Genova and Venice compete, rowing in medieval galleys (and in medieval costume, of course).

And Arezzo has a jousting, based on fighting the Saracens, I believe; Ivrea has a large orange hurling event that the teams wear masks for as hurled oranges hurt....

Well, since the last eleven or twelve days are going to be spread between Florence, Rome, and Sorrento/Amalfi Coast, I think I'll have some time to check out the smaller towns outside those cities. Siena sounds like a good one, and Lucca too.

The Milan/Venice/Northern Italy part of the trip is going to be quick, so I don't know if I'll have time to see Ferrara, even though that does look like a great little place.

You guys are getting me so excited about this trip!

Wow...a girl goes offline for a minute and zap--4 pages go by

Anyway, I found the Venetian apt. info--The apartment was in Ca Cerchieri. My contact was Filippo Gaggia--he speaks English and is familar with the Bay Area because he attended Cal. The phone number I have for him is 011-39-3048-2648077. Wonderful experience.

I've been to Italy, well, 9 times if count the time I had just been in '99 in November and was checking flights to visit my sister who now lives in Nashville and found a $323 flight to Italy. So that March 2000, I zipped to Italy for 2 weeks on my own! Fab!

I have to say that the best advice I've seen here is to not cram too much into a first trip. Try the broad brush approach. For you who'll probably return, I see from your comments, you want a sampling of the style of life! Your folks may have different views of what they want to see, so I'd be sure you all talk it over.

Bologna is a good place to visit; interesting and somewhat leisurely; It has 3 nicknames--La Dotta (The Learned-from the oldest University); La Rossa (The Red both from its early communist leanings to its red colored portici) and La Grassa (The Fat! Have one meal and you'll get that one!). But in some ways, Bologna to me is a second tier or second visit city.

I may have missed it on the thread, but how long is your total trip? You said on the airline thread that you might fly into Milan/Bologna and out of Naples?

What I'd suggest Kicky, is that you and your folks sit down and decide exactly what you would kick yourselves for missing this trip.
But to "feel" a city, as Osso has suggested, you need to spend some time not doing anything but strolling, sitting and watching. I have kind of a questionnaire I created from helping people plan trips that might be helpful to you in terms of developing your ideas of what you want to see and do and where to do it! I'll post the important questions from it a little later.

The how to narrow things down part is the hardest thing. You don't want Italy to fly by, you want that Dolce Vita, that Dolce far niente thang: The sweetness of doing nothing. The way I do it is to get flashy guidebooks, doesn't have to be the newest version either, it's just to "see" things. I'd rec. either DK's Eyewitness series by city or the enormous Italy version. Or Knopf makes one that's very similar. Or go on line, but I'm more of a tactile type, so if you go online, print. Oh, and visit the Italian tourism site and order their brochure: http://www.italiantourism.com/

Get yourself a big batch of Post It flags (the little colored tabbies): one color for sights and sites, one for hotels and one for restaurants.
Flag yourself silly! Try to pay attention to why you're flagging a place and maybe scribble a note on the tab: art, ambiance, period (Medieval, renaissance) of place. Now comes the hard part: reality. Take out the monthly calendar and pencil in the day you arrive and the day you leave. For me, it's all about the ease of travelling from one place to another. Travel in the direction from the airport you arrive in to the airport you're leaving from. That seems stupidly simple, but I have known folks who lose a day training back to Milan or wherever.

One of the best tools for planning is the Italian train site. Mostly, you can train because the distances are soooo much shorter than they are here! I always go 2nd class. The site will give you travel times and schedules: http://www.trenitalia.it/ Oh, and I hate to break it to you, but the No Smoking rule applies to trains as well. Not sure if this means they are eliminating entirely their smoking cars or not.

If you're driving, you can visit the Autoclub sites http://www.touringclub.it/international_TCI/index.asp and invest in a good map from The Touring Club Italiano. If you can't find their maps, find a good one with the largest scale possible?-if you're buying by the region, Umbria, Toscana etc, you want 1:180,000 or 1:200,000. That will usually show you good secondary roads if you don't want to highway from one place to another.

or the Autostrada info from Slow Travel http://www.slowtrav.com/italy/driving/autostrada.htm
Or the official site http://www.autostrade.it/ but I'm not sure it has an English version. You can still use it by entering the departure city (Italian name not English) and arrival and see fast ways to get there. Truth is, I wouldn't recommend driving unless you have a very very calm person to drive and a very very good person to navigate.

Now you have to start cutting away the second trip places. If you're not into fashion, shopping, opera, and don't have to see all of DaVinci, I'd spend just enough time to decelerate (two days total?) and then blow town. I like Milan, but it may not be the Italy you want to spend your valuable time on. Bologna may also go by the wayside but maybe you'll discover Ravenna and its mosaics and decide to spend a day in Bologna before you train to Ravenna. That's the sort of give and take. When you realize that you've cut something vital out (as we did with Venice), you make new compromises. I've been 9 times for a total 27-28 weeks; I feel like I've only scratched the surface, so don't try to do it all in one. Just pull out those things you really feel you can't miss.

Oh, my. I have so gone on haven't I? Sorry. It's important to me that people find the Italy that they are looking for so they enjoy it to its fullest!I'll stop and come back in a bit with the questionnaire! Sorry for hogging airtime guys, but you've wound me up on my favorite topic!!
Ciao, a presto!

sorry, hit it twice!

Oh, and also inMay in Venice is The Vogalonga, an amazing rowing race in which every and any style of boat that is rowed, from a 6 man gondola and a 20 person dragon boat, to a single canoe or kayak makes its way from the islands through the Grand Canal! The costumes range from the silly to the fabulous!

Thanks, but I just checked and the Vogalonga is on May 15th. I won't be there yet. It seems like all the festivals/events that I've looked up are either right before I get there, or right after. Crap.

And about your other, much longer post. Thanks for the great tips. I'm leaving on the 27th of May, arriving on the 28th, and I'm coming back on the 12th of June. So I guess not counting travel days, that's fourteen full days. Oh, and I have tried to plan it so that I start in the North and travel gradually to the south of Italy, for the reason you mentioned--I don't want to waste time backtracking all over the country if I can help it.

So, my updated probable itinerary is:

May 28th: Arrive in Milan. Check out Milan for that day and night.

May 29-30: Check out Venice and maybe Parma or some other areas of interest--still researching the area.

May 31-June 3: Florence and Tuscany area

June 4-8: Rome area

June 9-12: Amalfi coast--Sorrento, Naples, etc.

Also, I found that flying into Milan, and leaving out of Rome is cheaper, so on the 12th, I plan to take the train from Naples to Rome in the morning to catch a flight around noon-ish.

So, you can see that the first part is a little bit of a rush-rush-get-it-all-in-as-fast-as-possible kind of thing, but the rest of the trip should be a more relaxed pace. I hope.