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Planning, Podcast episodes

Episode #225: Avoiding Italy Trip Planning Mistakes – 2024 edition

Posted on by Untold Italy

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Planning a trip to Italy can prove more complex and overwhelming than you might think. The allure of Italy’s diverse attractions – from the ancient ruins of Rome to the scenic Amalfi Coast, draws millions of visitors annually, but the planning process can be daunting. Over the years, travel in Italy has evolved significantly. Gone are the days of spontaneous itineraries in any major destinations; now, savvy travelers must navigate the intricacies of booking popular attractions in advance, choosing the right way to book attractions and  accommodation, and being covered should the worst happen. By being aware of these challenges and preparing accordingly, you can ensure a more enjoyable and seamless trip to Italy.

Show notes

Untold founder Katy shares mistakes to avoid when planning a trip to Italy, as well as tips to make the best of your time there – in a live session from our newly launched Untold Italy Travel Planning Facebook page. In this update from our previous episode on mistakes to avoid (episode 120), she talks about the changes in travel to Italy in recent years and issues we have found people are having from both our Italy Travell Planning Facebook Community and our Trip Consultancies. Find out more about Katy and the journey of Untold Italy in episode 212 – The Untold Italy story – from webiste/blog to huge Facebook community, to specialist tour company and travel consultancy.

What you’ll learn in this episode

  1. Katy’s Untold Italy team  – the moderators in the Italy Travell Planning Facebook Community and our Untold Italy Trip Consultants have brought to light a few little mistakes that they are finding people repeating when they’re booking their Italy trips. Little things, but things that can potentially make things a little bit harder for them. So Katy decided to do a live session on the newly launched Untold Italy Travel Planning Facebook page to demystify some of these things and share some tips to help people streamline their Italy trip planning
  2. There’s so much information out there. In fact, there is an incredible amount of information out there online these days. But who to trust? Who do you know who/what is providing the correct information? Could it be out of date? Things don’t always move that fast in Italy, but some things do and it can be difficult to keep up (we know!)
  3. If it’s all getting too much and the planning of the trip is out-weighing the excitement of going to Italy, you can always book in for a trip consultation with one of our team members – who will get you organized in no time. It’s a very efficient process and our consultants are all experienced at traveling in Italy, so if you’re sick of trawling through forums, websites etc you can quickly get some help and get on with relaxing and dreaming of Italy
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The reality of travel in Italy in 2024

  • Katy has been going to Italy for over 25 years, and things have changed quite a bit over those years, and they’ve even changed quite a bit since Covid. If you have been traveling for a long time and went to Italy years ago, you will remember when things were a little more free and easy, but unfortunately, things have changed a little bit and it is difficult to be as unplanned as you used to get away with, especially if we’re going to the major tourist areas
  • Italy is the fifth most visited country in the world, and it’s incredibly popular for good reason. The history, the culture, the landscapes, the food – it really is the full package. It’s got everything that we want to experience when we go on vacation. But this is why over 50 million people visited Italy last year… which is a lot of people!
  • Around 35 million people will go to Rome. Rome is actually a relatively small city of 2.75 million people – so it’s a lot of people squashing into a small city, or rather in the epicenter of a small city
  • 12 million people visited the Colosseum in 2023 which was up 24 % on 2022. That’s over 30,000 people per day navigating an ancient site
  • Florence is even smaller than Rome and another one that people may be a little bit surprised by is Positano, which is so small with a population of less than 4,000 people, with only one road in and out
  • 5 million visitors a year go to the Amalfi Coast, so it’s hardly surprising that there are queues,  long waiting times and the frustration that can cause 
  • Italy is busier than it has ever been ad if you’re not ready for it, you might be disappointed or frustrated
  • It can be hard in the peak seasons to get taxis and restaurant reservations and these days, site tickets like the Colosseum, if you’re not prepared
  • Hotels are booked well in advance and accommodation prices are high due to demand
  • Katy has been many times in the last few years and has experienced getting really frustrated standing in taxi lines for an hour or forgetting to book her favorite restaurants and missing out
  • You cannot get away with winging it or figuring it out when you get there. You can give it a go, but it might be a little bit stressful to say the least
  • If your heart is set on experiencing the most popular things like the Colosseum and the Vatican museums in Rome or the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, you really need to be organized
  • We don’t want people to feel even more stressed about their trip, but just want to be just alerted to the challenges of travel in Italy these days
  • Of course, there are plenty of lesser-known and absolutely amazing places to go in all of those major cities and you will find ticket availability and less people. Maybe they’re not on Instagram or the top searches of Google, but they are on Untold Italy
  • Katy had a client reach out to her over the weekend who said that they were going to the Colosseum tomorrow and we’re just going to go there and see if they could book a tour. Katy cringed and thought – oh dear, because there is not a lot of availability right now, but suggested that he could go to the Baths of Caracalla, which is an amazing ancient site of former public baths
  • If you go there you can get a virtual reality headset and as you walk around, the headset shows you in really amazing detail what the baths were like. One of the things that surprised Katy about ancient Rome is the colors – you assumed things must have been muted, and rustic, but everything was very colorful

Discover some hidden gems in major cities

Spread outside of the historic center, but not too far

  • Head to Monti and the Prati districts where you can get better value for your accommodation and you still walk everywhere. Some of these neighborhoods like Trastevere are very, very busy. Walking around there are so many people – it’s like Disneyland on a summer weekend – very packed. So if that’s not the experience that you were hoping for for your stay, do try booking places outside of those main areas
  • One of our consultants, Kristen, noticed that everyone’s quite fixated on not going to a tourist trap or restaurants that are extremely popular, but the reality is that not every restaurant that’s popular with tourists is a tourist trap, including one of Katy’s favorites Roscioli. It’s very popular with tourists and locals alike
  • The reality is that most Romans who do not live in the center would avoid visiting the center, like in any big tourist city. Katy used to live in London, and they did not go anywhere near the tourist areas because they are just too full, so they would go to places more in their local neighborhood
  • If you’re going to be eating in the center, you’ll likely be mostly dining with other visitors unless you head out into the other neighborhoods. So advanced booking is key and consider heading out to neighbourhoods like Testaccio
  • You don’t have to have every minute planned, but we do suggest that you book your must-dos in advance and go for the very early or late sessions as well as have some options up your sleeves if you don’t feel like doing something one day, or it’s raining or it’s too hot
  • One of Katy’s favorite places she heads to in those situations is the amazing Capitoline Museums. You can just wander in and out, see the gigantic marble statues. It’s got great AC so is really cool in summer, and it’s warm in winter. It is a great place to go if you’re looking for something a little bit different and is rarely crowded

Don’t rely on Google Maps & understand the terrain

  • Katy recommends not relying on Google Maps or any algorithm-driven apps/site to fully plan your trip
  • Some people plan with no map at all, which is maybe even more baffling for experienced planners
  • Something key is to make sure that you understand a little bit about the geography of the places you are visiting. A walk or car journey that might seem simple looking on a map, might be a whole different prospect once you learn that it’s all up a steep hill or a single-lane road
  • Terrain-driven maps can be quite complicated but you can see things like heights and mountains on there, but you can also look at images of the local area to help give you an idea
  • A good example of this is Positano, which is basically built on a cliff. There was a viral TikTok last year of a young lady who was quite emotional because she had to carry her luggage up all these steps in major heat and was not prepared for it at all. Positano is not really great for anyone who has mobility issues, anyone traveling with small children, or in truth, anyone who’s traveling on a budget. If you have a big budget you are more likely to be having someone look after that luggage for you – but it takes a very big budget in Positano
  • Positano is an incredible place, but the reality of a small place with only 4,000 residents, is that thousands upon thousands of people trying to get into that small place every day creates difficulties
  • A client of Katy’s recently told her that it took them 2 hours to get down to the port from Naples the other day. This is why we try and get people to spread out along the coast
  • Another example is Capri, where you need the funicular or the bus to get up from the Marina Grande up to the main town, and with the huge influx of day trippers in summer, it gets super crowded
  • Have a few different options in mind.  If you’re thinking crowds will be too much for you, there are some other options. One of Katy’s favorite ones is the island of Ischia – where you can enjoy hot springs on the beach and castles
  • About a year ago in Venice, Katy noticed a strange occurrence. People had put their destination into Google Maps, and were then following the directions, heads down in their phones. Katy suddenly realized that Google was sending all the foot traffic, as it does with cars, along the same route – in a direction that they deem the best. So everyone ends up being pushed down the same little streets and it gets crowded and squashed. They were going to end up where they wanted to go, but if they had just gone a few steps to the right or down the next street, they could have had a more enjoyable stroll and been able to check out some shops and look in the windows and things like that
  • Google is our friend, but not always. We just need to realize that Google is pushing everyone down the same path. That’s also not just for maps – Google is vital for Katy’s business, but you need to stop and do a little critical thinking – why is it telling us this? Is it because this is the easiest way or the most common way, but not the best? Is it the most well-sponsored article, but not the best?
  • Italian schedules are not released far ahead of time – Katy has just come back from vacation in the United States and Google works fantastically there, but providers like Google and Rome to Rio don’t always have the best instructions in Italy because of the different way things work there
  • In Italy, there’s a very interesting quirk, in that the local transport providers do not publish their timetable content online very often, or if they do, it’s after the fact. So Google and Rome to Rio don’t have the latest information because no one has fed them the data
  • When you go to the Amalfi Coast because there are a few different ways to get there and what Google doesn’t tell you about a road, is that it’s jam-packed all day and there’s very limited parking in the towns when you get there
  • There is also a high chance that the local authorities could put up a last-minute restriction on visitor traffic like they did last year. We don’t recommend driving on the Amalfi Coast between probably April and the end of October because it can just be a nightmare
  • Katy and her family were driving there in April and it was really busy even then and they unfortunately had an accident. Luckily, her husband speaks a local dialect and we managed to sort it out pretty quickly, but you don’t want to be dealing with that when you’re on vacation if you can avoid it
  • Everyone should have a good look at the map, to where you are going and consider that things will take a little bit longer than they seem
  • Untold Italy has some good instructions on our website about how to get from point A to point B which goes into the different options and what to expect

Our A to B guides

Preparing for crowds and hot weather in summer

  • So with 50 million people in Italy in one year, (which is even bigger than 2019), it gets crowded
  • Even now some nationalities are not at their previous levels of travel, like China and Russian. So if even more people started traveling, it’s going to get crazier
  • In summer, as well as being crowded, it of course also gets hot and crowds make things seem hotter. If you don’t like the mix of heat and crowds then you want to have a good solid plan about how to deal with it
  • Florence is a really small city that has around 16 million visitors a year. Katy has been to Florence 5 or 6 times over the past couple of years and found it so busy
  • It’s really hard to get around in the city center, so you have to have a plan. The same applies for the Amalfi Coast, Capri, Sorrento, and the Cinque Terre, as well as popular small towns in Tuscany like Siena and San Gimignano
  • Avoid the middle of the day from around 10 am to 4 pm because people tend to do day trips to these places
  • If you can stay in the locations themselves and do day trips out to smaller, nearby places during the day or sit by the pool or enjoy going to the beach – then at dusk and at dinner time you can enjoy the sunset and your surroundings when all the day trippers have gone for the day because that’s when things really come to life and the locals come back out
  • These places are popular for a reason – they’re absolutely stunning, but you need to work around these busy times otherwise, it’s going to be an hour-long queue for your gelato which is simply no fun
  • In the big cities, the stone buildings retain the heat, and it also gets quite humid. Go to the main attractions and sites early in the morning or later in the afternoon to avoid the heat of the day
  • Keep in mind there is also not a lot of good air conditioning
  • What air conditioning there is, is not as strong and it is not used as commonly as you might expect at home
  • Energy prices are very high in Italy at the moment, and businesses are trying to save money
  • They’ve also got a strong culture of not turning airconditioning and heating until they absolutely have to 
  • Book places with a pool if you can in summer. There are some great places in Florenc in particular (find out our choices in our Florence with pools post)
  • In Rome, hotels with pools tend to be the 5-star type places, but you can actually go to the beach easily from Rome by train
  • Or you can simply just take it easy, sit in a shady piazza, rest your tired feet and hydrate
  • Don’t forget to carry your water bottle to fill it up with fresh drinking water for free, especially in Rome

Check cancelation policies and purchase travel insurance

Make sure you check cancelation policies for your hotels as well as for tours and activities

  • Planning can get frantic. You find a hotel or tour that looks amazing and you’ve been searching for hours, you’re tired and feel like you finally found it. Then you book it but don’t check the cancelation policies. Hopefully, you have no issues and get away with it but if your plans change this can really come back to bite you
  • It’s so important to check this kind of detail because things change. You might want to change your itinerary by a few days, you might have it changed for you and if you don’t have cancellation protection or the ability to move things it can get tricky
  • Katy tends to use booking.com when she is booking accommodation because you can easily see what the cancelation policy is and you can adjust for that
  • You might pay a few more Euros per night, but for Katy, the peace of mind is worth it
  • Katy has had to cancel a few things over the years, and it’s been really easy – you just go on the app and cancel
  • The same checks should be done for tours and tickets
  • Unfortunately, the main ticketing sites and the direct train companies are not very good at dealing with flexibility. Italian businesses can be frustrating as they do not have the level of e-commerce maturity that there is in countries such as the US and Australia. So third-party companies have come in and are able to offer the kind of service that many of us are more used to in terms of booking online
  • Some people are very keen to book directly with businesses but often when you book directly, they’re not offering the best cancelation options so it could be an issue down the line. I can be very difficult to get your money back
  • One of our moderators at Untold Italy, very impressively and doggedly, spent hours and hours online trying to get a refund for the train tickets that she booked before Covid – she managed to get them but the effort it required was verging on superhuman and it took. a very, very long time. Not many of us have the patience or tenacity for that

Make sure you have Travel Insurance to cover medical expenses or anything you can’t afford to lose

  • People can be a little bit wary of travel insurance, but it’s very important to be covered for health reasons
  • It can be as simple as tripping on a cobblestone – which we literally saw someone experience in our group recently. They had to rearrange everything, so cancelable bookings and the cost of re-arranging things being covered means a lot
  • If you also have trip insurance and  your trip is ruined by that trip on the cobblestones, then you will at least have money to come back to Italy
  • Katy doesn’t get trip insurance for lost luggage or anything like that – that’s a bonus if she gets that included, but it’s mostly about if there’s a problem health-wise. Make sure you are covered if you need to be flown home. Hopefully, you won’t ever need it, but it is always a good idea to have that in place because if you did it would cost 10s of thousands

READ: Why you need travel insurance for Italy.

Managing expectations and pace yourself

  • Everyone now seems to be looking for all those wow moments on a trip. We want every day to be absolutely amazing, don’t we?
  • We want to all those highs – the best experiences, the best gelato, the best photos. We want it all and we actually end up putting a lot of pressure on ourselves to make that happen
  • Social media has conditioned us to want and expect this when we go away, but it’s a bit unfair to expect anyone to be able to make perfection happen. It’s a lot for those planning the trip – which is often women doing the planning who are juggling a million other things already
  • To all you Italy trip planners – please don’t put too much pressure on yourself!
  • Don’t set the expectation with your families and your friends that your trip is going to be nonstop wow moments
  • If every single moment of your trip was a huge high, then you wouldn’t have any truly special moments to remember
  • Travel is the same as life  – it is not full of happiness all day every day. It’s full of ups and downs. We are not talking about bad things happening on your trip but you’d be very lucky to not have some annoying moments and you also need to pace things out a bit so that you have quiet moments to reflect on what you’ve experienced
  • It’s a good idea to plan days that are full of little undulating moments of beauty and quietness, as well as the big wow moments
  • An insider secret that Katy learned whilst setting up our small group tour company, Untold Italy Tours, from a coach helping to design the tours, was to build layers of experience. Include high moments and then quieter times – because we really want people to remember something that was outstanding or special. So when we’re doing our tours, yes, there are some massive highs, but there are also moments of quiet contemplation. We really want people to sit and soak it all in
  • Think about mixing things up – have one or two activities a day that you’re really excited about, but then spend the rest wandering around your neighborhood or sitting in a piazza just people-watching
  • Katy can also tell you, after many years of travel in Italy, that it’s often those moments that you least expect that are going to give you the wow anyway
  • You all deserve to have the wows – you’ve organized things, you’ve saved up as these trips are not cheap, and you want to make sure that you’re going to enjoy your trip and have those memories to take home
  • When we’re helping clients to plan their trips, we’re always really encouraging them to do this.  We can help with the downtime too. We know some really gorgeous cafés in piazzas that many people might not know about – to send you to go and soak up Italian life
  • On her trip earlier this year, Katy had a lovely lunch with her parents in a piazza in Trastevere. It wasn’t too busy and they just sat and enjoyed a really nice moment with a spritz and a taglieri (a plate of meat and cheese). They’d just been to the Vatican Museum, so they were tired and had just had a little wander before settling in the piazza. Katy looks back on this as one of the nicest moments of her entire trip – just spending some relaxed time with her parents hanging out in the piazza
  • Don’t try and see everything. Time is vital and having time to just be make a trip and is very Italian
  • Katy has been going to Italy for many years on countless trips and there are still a few regions she hasn’t been to yet – and she will eventually, but you can’t see and do everything

Official ticketing vs Third Party

  • don’t assume  that you have the best chance of getting tickets for attractions on the official ticketing sites
  • This issue we find coming up a lot lately and we are sorry for people missing out on things that they’ve been really excited about doing. We love Italy, of course, but it’s also full of many frustrations and unfortunately, the ticketing for major sites, particularly the Colosseum, the Vatican Museums, and the Last Supper in Milan is frankly a mess
  • With the yearly number of people visiting the Colosseum having risen 60% from 2019, which has made things more difficult for starters – the recent changes to how they are doing ticketing has added to the problems. They have tried to bring the ticketing in-house, and we’re not sure a site run by archeologists is the best at knowing e-commerce
  • These sites have very complicated business relationships with many other companies to sell tickets, and it’s their decision to sell tickets this way. If you are buying tickets through Get Your Guide, Tiqets or Viator, it is still official – they have to go through all these checks and balances with the official system because basically there’s no getting around it. So you can consider any reputable third-party vendor as ‘official tickets’
  • The one place you are more likely to get scammed on tickets is by the folks hanging around out the front of the Colosseum
  • You will definitely pay more on those third-party online sellers for tickets. This is partly because this year the Colosseum has forced them to bundle in other tours or activities – so for example, you can get a Rome tourist bus tour that includes a Colosseum ticket
  • It will be more expensive, but buying through these third-party online sellers is absolutely fine
  • The one thing you do need to do is check the company that is actually supplying the tour and look at their reviews. These providers like Get Your Guide and Viator must provide the tour provider information by law
  • With Get Your Guide, it’s at the top of the listing for each listing, whilst Viator hides that more – it can be found further down under more information
  • So Get Your Guide and Viator are not tour companies, but they do offer services where you can get online tickets and we find them on the most part to be the easiest option
  • Katy feels happy to pay a few Euros extra for the convenience of buying tickets with them rather than having to get up at 1am to try and get a limited number of official tickets
  • The official tickets that become available at these specific release times are not the full allowance of tickets for the time you will be going. They will have already made arrangements with all these other companies to sell them tickets. So you need to decide whether it’s worth your time to get up at whatever allocated time and take your chance ONLY 30 days out from your trip to get the tickets, or if you want to buy them through a provider and try and get some additional value from that experience as well

For a good experience don’t get basic entry

  • if you’re going to any of these famous sights, if this is your dream, don’t just get a basic entry ticket because it simply won’t be a great experience
  • Unless you’re the type of person that just wants some photos, when you go to these places alone you generally can’t understand what you are seeing, there’s not very many boards explaining what’s going on, so as a minimum, we suggest to get an audio guide
  • Katy wants to understand what she is seeing and if she’s investing 3 hours of precious vacation time, she definitely wants to learn all she can
  • A tour is a worthwhile investment to get to understand the history and all of the fascinating insights to this 2000-year-old site. For a comparison, Katy’s family has just come back from Disneyland and they paid so much more to go to Disneyland than you would for a Colosseum tour
  • There are different levels of tours – ranging from an audio guide, group tours, up to private tours
  • At Untold Italy we suggest Liv Tours and Walks of Italy as companies that we trust and recommend
  • They have amazing guides – they know how to get around, are really energetic and they have a way of explaining the information and getting across all the fun stuff about each of those sites in a way that makes you more engaged

Ticket buying guides

Don’t be afraid to visit less-known cities and towns

  • This is why we’re called Untold Italy, because we want to get you out of just the major cities. We love Rome, Venice and Florence, but the experiences you can have in some of the smaller or less visited cities and towns of Italy, give you a whole other kind of experience
  • Even if it is your first trip, if you can add one in you’ll find it to be a bit special
  • Try Turin (Torino), Verona, Lucca – find somewhere really beautiful and different that everyone’s not going to

Discover some off-the-beaten-path destinations

Trip planning can be hard – don’t beat yourself up

  • Everyone is trying so hard to build the trips of their dreams, and it really is honestly really hard work
  • Katy and the Untold Italy travel consultants have been doing this for years, some for decades, so it’s not something that you should expect to master in a week
  • If you’ve never been to Europe or you’ve never been abroad, don’t beat yourself up for feeling overwhelmed. It takes a lot of experience (including mistake-making) to find out about all the ins and outs
  • There is a lot of information on our website – you can use the search function to find a myriad of articles to help you and on our podcast episodes which all have detailed show notes. You’ll find information to help you get from A to B and how to use the train network, as well as how to buy tickets to the Colosseum, Vatican, etc
  • We are committed to making sure our info is up to date, which is an ongoing task. If you’re looking at articles online, check the dates on the post to make sure it’s fairly recent
  • A lot of people like to use YouTube as a resource. Katy has not (yet) got into creating videos for YouTube in earnest (she does aim to get better), but she does warn that just because someone makes a nice video doesn’t mean they’re an expert. If you’re happy to follow someone’s advice who’s been to Italy once, maybe twice, then that is all good – but just be aware that that is what you are doing
  • We have people on our team who live in Italy, we have people around the world who have traveled to Italy many, many times as Katy knows you need considerable experience to be handing out advice. Everyone is free to take anyone’s advice they can, and we do advise(!) getting advice – but you should consider whose advice you are taking
  • As an analogy – Katy is doing a house build at the moment, which is something she has never done and knows nothing about, so she is very happy to engage some experts to help her
  • If you’re feeling overwhelmed (and we can understand why!), you might like to work with one of our trip-planning consultants who have a lot of experience planning trips in Italy
  • Apart from getting access to the special secrets that we keep for clients, friends, and family, this is also the most efficient way to get your trip planning done because we are planning trips to Italy week in and week out, and you might do it only once a year or even once in a lifetime

DISCOVER: More on How our Trip Planning Consultants can help you.

Useful planning posts

Live questions

If you’re booking a guided tour direct for the official site – do you know if the Vatican one includes being taken inside at St Peter’s or do you need to line up again? Also with third-party tours, if they can’t secure tickets that you’ve booked, then what’s your suggestion?

Katy believes that the door between the Vatican – Sistine Chapel and St Peter’s is currently open. She has only done third-party tours there recently with Walks of Italy and Liv Tours, and it was open for them. She isn’t 100% sure for direct Vatican tours but would assume so.

A difference between the Vatican tours and those two companies is that you are in a much bigger group. The style of the tour also depends on the guide, so if you like historical facts and religious observations, then the Vatican tour is great. For Katy, she finds she needs a little bit more entertainment, so she chooses companies that have more an entertainment style rather than getting information across.

Every single guide in Rome doing Vatican tours must have a license. They have all done the same extensive training – so it really comes down to the delivery.

With third-party tours, like Walks of Italy and Liv Tours, tickets are included with the price of your tour. Sometimes if you book with an independent travel guide, they will ask you to book your tickets separately. That’s because they don’t have the time to spend trying to book tickets online alongside taking tours. The larger established companies can be better than individual guides also because they’ve got a bank of guides – so if someone’s sick or something happens, they move people around and make sure the tour goes ahead.

Both Walks of Italy and Liv Tours have a specific person that just works on securing tickets all day, every day. They also offer 24-hour cancelation. If you book through the direct, it’s hard to get a refund if you need to change your plans.

These tours are not cheap. But if you’re going halfway around the world and you want to see the Vatican or Colosseum – if you want to get behind the visuals and learn the history, you get so much more with someone who can tell you about what it’s all about.

If you just want to go and take photos, there are plenty of opportunities to do that outside the sights, so you could consider taking your photos outside and then going somewhere like the Baths of Caracalla, which won’t be busy, you can get tickets when you arrive and you can walk around.

Find out more in these articles:

Goats cheese

What is the goat’s cheese farm that was mentioned in the past on the podcast?

There’s so many goats cheese farms in Italy, but a lot of them are private – you can’t just turn up. So you would need to book a tour of some kind that includes this, or you could find an agriturismo that you could stay at that is also makes goat’s cheese. 

There are some good farms in Tuscany. There’s a fantastic one that you can visit near Pienza, called Podere il Casale.

Find information on all aspects of Untold Italy

trip planning services

Expert Assistance

Need some help planning your trip?

Book in for a trip consultation with our expert Italy travel planners ready to help you build your dream vacation in Italy whether that be a classic first timer trip or an off the beaten path adventure

more information
Places mentioned in the show
  • Baths of Caracalla – Rome’s second largest Roman public baths first built in early AD 200s and operated until the 530s
  • Roscioli – fantastic restaurant in Rome
  • Monti, Prati, Trastevere, Testaccio – neighborhoods of Rome
  • Capitoline Museum – a single museum containing a group of art and archaeological museums in Piazza del Campidoglio, on top of the Capitoline Hill
  • Ischia – island near Capri with hot spring beaches
  • Vatican Museums – the public museums of Vatican city 
  • Turin (Torino) – the Piedmont city, the former captial of Italy and home to an array of palaces and castles
  • Verona – northern city, home to Romeo and Juliet
  • Lucca – gorgeous Tuscan hilltop town
  • Podere il Casale – charming farm in near Pienza producing cheese as well as olive oil, wine and other products

Resources from Untold Italy

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