Carnival Magic 9 day cruise from Barcelona

Check out the shore excursions available through your cruise company. Cruise companies usually showcase the most popular sites in the shore excursions, and there is usually a good range of prices. Also pick up a copy of the Rick Steves' Guidebook for Italy, so you can read about the various cities to see what might interest you. In addition, you can Google each city, and various items you will find on the Google search will show photos of the various cities and the sites they offer.............after that, you will most likely have your to-do list. It is hard for someone to really make broad recommendations on this posting board, as people answering don't know your general interests, activity level, etc. For instance, taking Rome for example, there is the Forum,the Colosseum, the Vatican Museum, St. Peter's, and on and on. Not knowing how much time you will have in each port, I'm guessing it would be hard for you to see all of that in one day, but if you have two days, then it's do-able. www.cruisecritic.com is another great site that reviews various shore excursions by cruise line and also provides some advice for those who want to tour on their own vs. a group from the ship. Perhaps this is your first cruise, and you have not yet received the tour packet from your cruiseline? All the information should be available on their web site, too. Have a great time!

Rick Steves has a new book on the cruise ports in the Med. I just received my copy yesterday and it loos quite good - it would probably help you pick the right excursions for you.

Mike, first off, hello neighbor! I'm from Chesapeake! Second, I would definitely take Margaret's advice and go to cruisecritic.com and research the information there. You can also meet up with others on your sailing. We're cruising in early September and have set up several excursions with members of our roll call.

While researching private tours in Naples to the Amalfi Coast (day trip only), I found many posts by cruise clients who found the excursions offered by the cruise line to be too expensive and too "captive". Many cruise ship patrons conacted local private tour companies and d their own 'private" 6 hour or more tour, going where they wanted and staying for as long as they wanted, all the while in the care of a local driver who spoke fluent English. I emailed some of those happy patrons, whose reviews I found on Tripadvisor, and then emailed several tour company websites that they used to get prices and to develop my own private day tour itinerary. It is a pretty ambitious way to spend the day, but I thought I would share the idea.

We originally planned to do a cruise of the Mediterranean, but changed our mind because we wanted to spend more time seeing the countries than you get while visiting a port. Before I cancelled our cruise we had met up with other cruise members and planned private tours with them at each port. I met them through the cruisecritic forum. It is a good place to meet people on your ship. We were to pay our portion at the end of each tour so you didn't need to worry about sending money ahead of time to people you didn't know.

Just curious, and for future reference, is Livorno the cruise ship port for Florence? Thanks

Thanks everybody for your help, and suggestions. Mike