Provence to Italy by Car

Stacey, a couple of points.
If you are planning to visit rural locations (not cities), a car is good. If you are planning to visit chiefly city centres, a car is a liability as it has to be parked at the edge of the city (for which you pay), and then get public transport into the city. This particularly applies to the "big name" cities in Italy, Turin, Milan, Bologna, Florence, Venice etc.
Also, where do you plan to drop the car off? If you pick the car up in Avignon, but return it in Italy, there will be a big surcharge. You need to find out how much and budget for it.

in southern France, I would recommend Orange, famous for its Roman remains, and the Pont du Gard.
And don't forget Avignon itself. It has the Papal Palace and lots more besides.

Thanks Chris. I was going to drop the car in Milan when we fly out.

It typically costs several hundred Euros to rent a car in one country and drop it in another. And a car as noted is a liability if you are visiting cities. They don't allow driving in the center (big fines) and parking is expensive. Rent a car if you plan to spent some time exploring Provence, but use the train for visiting major cities.

We have done similar trips, but in the opposite direction, like this. Travel between Nice and the nearest Italian city with car rental agencies by train. Pick up or drop a car in Nice and in that Italian city. It's less hassle than it seems, and it saves hundreds of euros. (The drop fees are staggering.) Depending on our itinerary, we've sometimes stayed overnight in Nice or the Italian city. You can investigate the cost of dropping in another country by using the AutoEurope site. We once dropped a car in San Remo when we were coming from southern Liguria, and took the train to Nice. Another time we took the train from Nice to Turin and got a car there. The trains were local and very inexpensive.

I am usually game for driving in Europe but if you plan to spend any time in Milan on a weekday, you should definitely (I can't stress that enough) get rid of the car. It could be around 500 euros extra to return a car in Italy that is rented in France. That is what I was told in 2014 when I was looking at a one-way rental with the drop off in France.

We just made our car rental reservation in France. This company (Hertz through Eurocar) and others stipulate the countries into which you can take that rental car. Italy is not one of them. This is not the first time we've dealt with this.

I don't know which company Lois, above, has reserved with; but I can assure you that 2 years ago we picked up a car in Nice, We then proceeded to drive into Italy for 2 weeks, and then back to France for 2 more weeks. I specifically checked to make sure there would be no problem about taking the car into another country, The rental car companies seem to care only about cars being taken into Eastern Europe. If I'm remembering correctly, our insurance coverage through our credit card (Amex) also covered us, as long as we had picked up the car in France. It wouldn't if we had picked up the car in Italy.

I mentioned in my last post that I visited Eurocar (I just read my paper and it was actually AutoEurope) which then booked us through Hertz. I don't remember how I booked two years ago but it was the same deal: both times we booked to pick up and drop off the car in France and was either told that Italy was not a country that we could take the car, or they had a list of countries that were okay to drive into but Italy was not on the list. Now you could probably take the car into Italy against their policy but I wouldn't want to have an accident in a country that I was not allowed to drive the car into.

Several years ago, we rented a car in Germany and dropped the car in Italy through AutoEurope/Eurocar. The drop fee was huge ($500), but with our itinerary, anything else just wasn't going to work. We also used American express and confirmed that since we rented in Germany, the insurance was valid if we drove into Italy. But if we rented the car IN Italy, then AX insurance was not valid.

stacey,

As the others have pointed out, it would be much better to drop the car in France (perhaps Nice) before heading into Italy. Travelling by train from Nice to Milan is relatively easy.