We're planning a 10-day family trip to Rome and Florence in May. This will be our first trip to Europe and we'll be splitting our time between the two cities. However, we're not sure how much time we should split between the two.
We arrive in Rome and ultimately fly out of Bologna. We've got multiple travel guides, but it's hard to gauge how to allocate our time in each location.
What recommendations do you have, or what would you suggest considering, when deciding how to split our time?
4 nights in Rome, 3 nights in Florence is the ideal for a 7 night stay. Although you may have more nights available.
Many travelers also plan to take some day trips in Tuscany using Florence as a base, if that is the case for you, then add some nights to Florence.
Be aware that if your flight out of BLQ is in the morning, you should spend the last night in Bologna.
I commend you on giving each city ample time. Do the 10 days include flight days or do you actually have 10 nights in Italy to work with? Unlike the native son Roberto de Firenze, I would want 3 full days in Florence, so 4 nights, unless you leave Rome early in the morning. I have not been to Bologna yet, but it's on my bucket list, so you might want to consider leaving Florence late in the afternoon and spend two nights there so you have the day before your flight to see Bologna. Maybe do a good tour in Bologna.
I'd split the days evenly between the two cities for two reasons. First, you'll probably need that much time in Rome to really do it justice. Second, Florence might not require that much time, but you'll need it to do day trips from there and to get to Bologna for the trip home.
Hi all,
Thanks for the helpful responses! For a little more detail we leave Boston, Mass on a red eye and arrive in Rome at 8 a.m. on the 8th of May. We expect to be pretty beat so we're planning to do a bit of exploring without any real set agenda.
We're tentatively planning to stay in Rome through Sunday afternoon, the 12th.
From there we're planning to take the train from Rome to Florence, probably in the afternoon.
This will give us the 13th through the 16th in Florence.
We ended up changing our flight on the 17th to fly out of Florence at 3 pm instead of flying out of Bologna. This will allow us to maintain Florence as the home base for the rest of our trip, avoid moving to a third hotel and, perhaps, allow us to squeeze in a day trip to the countryside somewhere.
This ends up giving us about 5 days in Rome and 4 days in Florence.
If you have any ideas or suggestions, particularly for a day trip somewhere, we remain all ears!
You will love flying out of the Florence airport. It's small and not very far out of town.
Sounds perfect! We were just there in March and split 5 days in Florence and 5 days in Rome. We could have used plenty more time in each city, but it did feel like a nice amount of time in Florence especially. I’m very glad we didn’t try to add a 3rd location.
From Florence, we took a long daytrip to Cinque Terre (with a quick stop in Pisa for the tower). We were planning another trip to Lucca, but it was rainy so instead we opted for a short bus ride up to Fiesole instead.
From Rome, we took a daytrip to Orvieto, and another to Anzio to pay tribute to my husband’s grandfather’s landing in WW2.
