What I Always Tell First-Time Visitors to Italy

Italy is the destination I get asked about more than any other. And I understand why. It has everything — the food, the history, the light, the feeling of being somewhere that has been beautiful for a very long time and intends to stay that way.

But Italy also has a particular way of humbling the over-planner. I’ve seen influencers arrive with ambitious itineraries — Rome, Florence, Venice, the Amalfi Coast, Cinque Terre, all in ten days — but they don't know how exhausted and disappointed how truly they are, having spent most of their time in transit between extraordinary places they didn’t have time to actually experience.

So here’s what I tell every first-time visitor before we start planning.

Florence is one of the best base camps in Europe. Use it properly.

Florence sits in the heart of Tuscany and within easy reach of more day trips than you could fit into a two-week trip. Siena. San Gimignano. The Chianti wine region. Lucca. Pisa. You can see the whole of Tuscany without once changing hotels — which means you settle in, you find your rhythm, and the city starts to feel like somewhere you actually live rather than somewhere you’re passing through.

This is the approach I almost always recommend for a first Italy trip. Stay longer in fewer places. Use Florence as your anchor. Take the day trips you want to take, and come home to the same restaurant two nights in a row if you feel like it.

The half-day rule

One of the most useful things I’ve learned about Italy specifically is this: book your major sightseeing for the morning and leave the afternoon unscheduled. Every time.

The reason is practical. The major sites — the Uffizi, the Vatican, the Colosseum — are genuinely extraordinary and they genuinely take it out of you. After two or three hours of concentrated history and art, most people need to sit down somewhere, have a long lunch, and simply exist for a while. That’s not laziness. That’s how you actually absorb where you are.

An afternoon with nothing booked in Italy is never wasted. It becomes a walk that leads somewhere unexpected, a market you hadn’t planned on, a shop down a side street that turns into the best hour of the whole trip.

The tourist trap test

Italy has more tourist traps per square kilometre than almost anywhere else in Europe.

After years of travelling there, I’ve found the signs are almost always the same.

• A restaurant with a patio directly on a famous square, a menu in six languages, and a host outside actively trying to seat you — walk past

• Photos of the food on the menu — almost always a sign the food doesn’t speak for itself

• The words ‘authentic’ or ‘traditional’ anywhere in the window — the real ones don’t need to say it

• A queue of people with rolling suitcases — locals don’t eat where tourists queue

The best restaurants in Italy are almost always the ones that require a little effort to find. A recommendation from your hotel. A side street two blocks from the main square. A place with a handwritten menu and no English translation. That’s where the real Italy is.

One more thing about the trains

Italy’s high-speed trains are genuinely impressive. Rome to Florence in ninety minutes. Florence to Venice in two hours. It sounds like an easy way to see multiple cities.

And it is if you don’t mind that every train journey is still a half-day when you factor in getting to the station, navigating it, waiting, the journey itself, arriving, orienting yourself, and getting to your next hotel. Italian train stations, particularly Roma Termini and Milano Centrale, are large, busy, and genuinely overwhelming if you’re not used to them.

My advice: use the trains selectively, not habitually. One or two train journeys in a two-week trip feels like an adventure. Five or six starts to feel like a logistics exercise.

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