8 weeks in Italy, Itinerary options

With 8 weeks, have you considered splitting your trip into 4 locations--starting in the south and then heading north?
A villa would be nice if you had visitors coming and going, but an agriturismo apartment in a central location would be nice.
And it'd be nice to lease a car for the time you're there to take day trips. Travel in your own car allows flexibility no public transit or trains will afford.

Accept that, even with 8 weeks, there will be many lovely parts of Italy you do not have time to see. What are your interests? Scenery? Antiquities? Picturesque historic towns? Museums (art or other)?

Here are a few thoughts on your itinerary:

Do NOT go to Sicily for 3 days. It's easily worth 2 weeks. It's a large island with a great variety of sights. You need to decide whether to allocate sufficient time to Sicily to make going there worthwhile. I loved it. But there's more than enough on the mainland to fill 8 weeks. A big advantage of including Sicily on this trip is that the weather should be quite a bit milder there than it will be in the northern part of the mainland. I think you'd love 10 - 12 days there, if you can find the time.

Is there a reason for 7 days in Pisa? I can't imagine that. I've never seen anyone recommend even one night there. It's normally handled as a day-trip from Florence--often in conjunction with Lucca--since it only takes a few hours. If you're looking for a city with really good transportation connections, I'd use Florence or Bologna instead. Florence has more sights of its own, but Bologna is unusually well-positioned for side-trips to places like Ravenna, Ferrara, Modena, etc.

If you plan to have a car (investigate leasing, possibly in France), you could choose a more rural area as one of your bases--probably in Tuscany--if you don't mind being in an environment that's likely to be very quiet in winter/spring. Personally, I'd want to be in a city at that time of year for sure.

Four days sounds like a lot in the Cinque Terre, especially in early spring. I'd expect chilly, damp weather unless you're quite lucky.

I don't know anything about the conditions in the Dolomites in mid-April. I loved the area in the summer, when it offered a respite from the killer heat I encountered elsewhere in Italy. In any case, I wouldn't go to Castelrotto for one night. If you're going up that way, you should spend several days there.

Five days is an unusually long stay in Milan.

If you have 8 weeks, a great plan would be to split the time half and half between Florence and Rome. They are so radicallty different from each other so you can experience Italian life in the fast lane (Rome) and the more relaxed side of Italy in Florence. With 4 weeks in each you will not be burdened with carting luggage on the trains/packing/unpacking which will allow more time for seeing the sights. Even though you could easily stay in either Florence or Rome for 4 weeks and still not see everything worth seeing, a month in each would give you time to see a LOT and still have time for numerous day trips on the terrific Italian train system. From Florence you can easily get to Lucca, Pisa, Bologna, Cortona, Arezzo, San Gimignano, Siena and other Tusan towns, even Milan. From Rome you can get to Orvieto, Ostia Antica, Tivoli, Assisi (long day but doable), Napoli, Frascati, Pompeii (another long day but doable). By being based in fewer places, I believe you will enjoy your sabbatical MUCH more (IMO). You will feel more at home, more settled and more relaxed vs. running helter skelter from one hotel/apartment to another and from one part of Italy to another. Definitely I agree with others to limit the parts of the country you visit - you can ALWAYS go back!

Susan, you have captured the my thoughts, 14 stops might be a bit much. I will look into 4 weeks in Rome. I don't want to be the eternal tourist moving from one place to the next. I'd like to savor the moment, settle in, see the sights at a liesurely pace, and pretend I live in Italy if only for four weeks. Thank you

If you can find a reasonably priced apartment, you could take a few overnight trips as well, without breaking the bank.

Agree with Susan with regard to basing in two (or three at the most) places and day tripping from those locations. Suggest you take a map and put a star on the places that hold the most interest for you. Then pick a place surrounded by a number of them and use that as a base location. Might take a bit of trial and error to finalize, but it may very well save a lot of back and forth time while you are there.

I love the idea of 4 weeks in Rome and 4 weeks in Florence with some overnight trips thrown in. Personally, I could find enough to do in-and-around Rome to fill many months! Same with Florence: fascinating and very different cities. Florence is smaller but within shoutin' distance from lots of other locations to explore. You'll have the rare (for most) opportunity to get to know both on a deeper, more intimate level than most travelers. I'm jealous! :O)

Rick's itineraries are not the best features of his books (too much moving in the time allotted), but even if they are good for 2-3 weeks, they are quite unsuited for 8 weeks.

With that much time, I'd try to get 4 bases of two weeks each, or 2-3 bases if you really want to dive into an area. I also agree that spending 2-3 weeks in Sicily is a great idea, but spending 2-3 days there is a waste of time.

A week in Pisa isn't such a bad idea. While the "tourist" part of Pisa is small and easily seen in half a day, the rest of Pisa is not touristy. There's certainly more to see in Florence, but much of the center is dominated by tourism. So, it depends on your goals. So many people say they want to "be like a local" and "not be a tourist" when they travel. That will be easier in Pisa than in Florence.

I spent eight weeks of my sabbatical in Italy last year. It was super fun - you will have a blast. For the core of the trip, we booked stays in apartments of one week each in Bologna, a small village in southern Tuscany, Florence, Positano and Rome. This core was book-ended by shorter stays in other places at the beginning and end of the trip. I thought this approach worked well. We took lots of day trips by car and train. You might want to think about saving Sorrento, the Cinque Terre, Varenna and the Dolomites for your next trip, since the weather may not be ideal.

Mary Sue's trip is more or less the way I do things. But every traveler is different, and some would glory in a couple of 4-week stays. It's always a trade-off between really settling in and the opportunity to see more places that are distinctly different. Although one could camp out in Florence for ages and visit tons of charming hill towns, for me the seventh hill town would be much less interesting than the first, and I'd be ready for something different.

What I suggest is getting two or three comprehensive guide books to Italy from the library (Rick's is good, but his is not comprehensive.) They don't have to be the most recent edition. Make a list of all the places that sound intriguing. Plot them on a map. Will you be OK with skipping all the interesting places outside the two largest clusters on your map? If not, what about skipping the places outside the three largest clusters? And so on.

The weather will be iffy in March-April, which I think argues for a somewhat slower pace than I might attempt in the summer. There may be days when you just don't want to spend a lot of time outdoors, which is pretty much where you'll be when making day-trips to small towns.

I agree that you should consider leaving some of the most problematic destinations for a future trip when the weather will be better. You could spend most of your time from Rome south, then add on Florence toward the end of this trip. Trip #2 could hit some of the northern attractions.

Thank you for all the suggestions and help. This has given me a new path to take for my sabbatical planning.

I'd like to add one comment to the post regarding a week in Pisa being a less touristy choice than Florence. Yes, maybe. But in several trips to Florence, the most recent being a month long in September/October we rarely saw a lot of tourists unless we were standing in front of or walking near a tourist site, Palazzo Vecchio, Duomo, Uffizi, etc. It all depends on where you stay and where you choose to eat. We would occasionally see an American or two on the local buses, once or twice in a neighborhood restaurant, only one time in line at a grocery store, but generally everyone we saw on a regular basis were Italians, native Florentines. It's very easy to "be a local" if you avoid all the highly rated whatevers on Trip Advisor. Just my experience and opinion.