Driving in Italy

We are planning many day trips from around the major cities. In Greece we plan on seeing more ruins.

You plan on taking the car to Sicily and Greece? You have worked out the logistics? I have not looked at that but if I were compelled to place a bet, it would be that ferry fees for the car would be much more expensive than flying.

For the destinations you list, you may be better off renting car when you need to go to some remote place, rather than paying stiff parking fees in all the big cities you list. (That's my unsolicited $0.02)

3-5 days per city will give you time to see the typical 'must see' sites at each.

I’d think about staying outside of major cities and taking trains in for day trips or a couple nights. You do not want you drive or park a car in Rome or Florence.

No, I don't think you have enough time to cover the ground you are proposing to cover--at least not very well. Sicily alone really needs at least 2 weeks (more time if you don't have a car), and that doesn't allow time to go to the Aeolian Islands.

A lot depends on what you want to see in Greece. Some people go there for just a week, squeezing in Athens and one island. I wouldn't go all the way to Greece (from the US or Canada) for such a short time, because I like the mainland and the Peloponnese and would want to go to multiple islands.

I agree with the earlier comment that the car will be an impediment in the major cities, and it will probably be costly to ferry it to and from Greece. You need to do some work on your itinerary to be sure you really want to have a car for the entire time.

Since Italy appears to be the core of your trip, I urge you to buy a comprehensive guidebook to Italy (Rick is good but is selective in what towns/cities he covers, leaving out many interesting places). Read that book and make a list of the places you want to see in Italy alone. My bet is that you will have more you want to see in Italy than can be accomplished in 6 weeks. "Naples" may not sound like much, but what about Pompeii, Capri/Ischia, the Amalfi drive, etc.? You didn't mention Venice, the Dolomites, the lakes, Puglia, the Tuscan countryside...

As a general rule, 3 to 5 days at a major destination is awfully short if it is intended to include "many day-trips". For me, the time spent on day-trips would be extra.

If you have checked all these out, great, but if you don't completely understand IDP, TUTOR, ZTL and national speed limit, please ask.

Thanks everyone for the advice. Appreciate it very much. Will take suggestions under advisement! 🙂

Six weeks is a good amount of time to cover most of Italy, at least the top places. Since you have a car take advantage of it to visit the small towns and the countryside. You won’t need the car while visiting the big cities, so in those circumstances the car will stay parked at the hotel or at a garage. Or maybe you prefer to stay in small nearby towns and commute into the big cities from there. It’s up to you.

With 6 weeks you have time for Sicily as well. Crossing to Sicily with a car is not overly expensive. It’s about 40€ for car+4passemgers.

I don’t recommend going to Greece with your leased car. First of all the trip on the ferry is 16 hours long but the cost to ferry the car across is several hundreds euro. It’s generally cheaper to fly to Greece and rent a car once there. Also, I don’t know if your car lease allows you to put the car on a ship for those distances.

I just plotted your trip on google maps. It is easily more than 4000 miles - without side trips - and 4 ferry trips.

My €0.02 - You can easily see most of the French Riviera by train and bus. A car is likely to be a more of a PITA (pain in . . . ) than an asset, unless you only want to do the scenic driving along the Corniches to Italy. Most of Italy is easier to visit by train than car. Sicily needs at least 2 weeks and a car is best and easy enough to rent one for 10-14 days (you won't need it for the entire time you're there). Flying from Italy to Greece will be faster and probably a lot cheaper than trying to take a car. You will not want a car in Athens any more than you'd want one in Rome or NYC. Rent a car to tour the Peloponnese. Then you can fly home from Greece rather than backtracking along much of the same road through Greece to the ferry to get back to Italy.

I agree with Roberto. If you want a car, then stay outside large cities and take the bus or train into town. We've done this in both Italy and Scotland. If you do this, you'll have to work out some logistics if you want to stay overnight in the city.

Carefully examine your priorities. If you want to be in the countryside, then a car will work. If you are just interested in getting from one city to another, public transportation would work better.

While I think we all would love to have 6 weeks to travel and it seems like a long time, let's do some math. I'll use 5 days each stop, which gives you 8 different locations. You've already named 4 specific places, with Sicily, Greece and the eastern side of Italy as more general areas. This doesn't account for travel days. If you aren't taking at least a day exploring as you get from one city to another (Nice-Milan, Milan-Florence, Florence-Rome, etc.) you might as well take the train. I also think you should plan for every fourth day to be an unscheduled day, with nothing planned to allow you time to just knock about. As you start to make more detailed plans, I think you'll realize even with six weeks you are being ambitious. You'll then have to choose whether you want a rushed trip or a more relaxed trip.

Thanks for the advice! Everyone has giving us plenty to think about. This is our first trip overseas. Being from California, we drive in our RV around the U.S..
We usually drive anywhere from 150-300 miles a day
I’m wanting a more relaxed trip. Looks like we should scale down the trip a bit. Appreciate all the advice!

Six weeks is a good chunk of time. You can’t see all of Italy, but it’s at least twice as long as most Americans have for vacation when they visit Italy.
If you include Sicily, be aware that Sicily needs at least 2 weeks to see all they have to offer.
Also Sicily is a very long drive from Nice. Nice to Palermo is 1000 miles plus there is a ferry crossing, so even if you wanted to drive straight one day drive is not enough.
It might be a better idea to fly there from Nice or Genoa. However if you already have a deal with a leased car, take advantage to visit what you can with a car.
Whatever itinerary you choose, I don’t recommend to include Greece. The ferry cost and the time to get there by car would negate any savings you might have gotten with the car lease. If you want to see Greece fly there on another trip or take two extra weeks to vacation there, but fly to Greece and rent another car there if you need.

mrlgsl, you say "This is our first trip overseas. Being from California, we drive in our RV around the U.S.". Condensing what the others say, driving in Europe will not be the same, by a long way.

I sincerely hope you are not planning to lease an RV. It just won't fit. Any medium sized town or city does not let cars into the centre. By "medium sized", I mean population 10,000-25,000 upwards. This may be one or two streets, or in a big city, an area of multiple square Km's which are "pedestrian, residents and deliveries only". These are called ZTL in Italy.
You either park on the edge of the centre (pay), and walk in, or in big cities (Milan, Florence, Rome, Naples, Nice) get public transport in. Or you travel city-centre to city centre by train.

Cars are good for rural areas, and allow you to get to the villages and small towns. You still need to pay for parking. If you want to do this, plan to visit towns of UNDER 10,000-15,000 population only.

With respect to Chris F, I actually did drive an RV across Europe, starting in Paris, and getting down to Rome. The streets ARE narrow, but with the RV, we had a camping vacation with our children, ages 13 and 11. You don't get to explore city centers with an RV, but there are many campgrounds across Europe, including Italy. They are a unique way to tour, and are generally located on the outskirts of cities, with public transportation to whisk you into the city centers. In Pisa, we stayed on the outskirts and took a cab to the city center. Siena has a campground on a hill, with buses frequently traveling to the center. In Rome, the beach campground in Lido Ostia was lovely, if a little far from downtown, and the campground in Venice was served by a vaporetto which made regular journeys to St. Mark's Square.

Chris's point is valid, however, because the sheer size of an RV is a limit to the places you may wish to travel. European driving, and especially in Italy, is not for the timid, and the tolls are expensive. Every one of the cities you have listed in Italy is better served by train (by "better" I mean easier and usually less expensive than driving) and the comprehensive rail network is painless to use. When using trains, you can sit back, enjoy the view, and catch up on your napping and journaling. Traveling to Greece and Sicily is likely better done by air.

There is a huge difference between driving hundreds of miles in much of the US and doing the same thing in Italy. In the US you may by whizzing past fields of corn/soybeans/cotton/etc. In Europe you will be bypassing beautiful historic towns. In Italy alone there are way more fascinating places than you could even think about covering in six weeks or even in six months.

There is no reason to have a car if you are going to simply drive it from Milan to Florence to Rome to Naples. The Frecce trains will get you to those places much, much faster.

Well, just think of doing 150-300 miles on Highway 1, or a loop around SF Bay in rush hour, heck, not even in rush hour. It's not apples and oranges, it's apples and bicycles.

This being your first trip to Europe, please take the time to thoroughly read the Travel Tips section of this website, including all the articles. Also make a visit to the Explore Europe article on Italy and watch Sara Murdoch's travel talk video, Packing Light & Right.

Another excellent source about car rentals and driving in Europe is Gemut.com, especially the free download called What you should know about renting a car in Europe 2019.

I agree with others who have said that 6 weeks is not enough time to do all you want to do, and that a car is not needed for your planned big-city destinations. I totally get the attraction of driving, but you can also see a lot from the train enroute to them.

My husband and I are fans of driving in the US and Europe. We have rented cars for shorter times (ranging from 2-3 days to 2-3 weeks), didn't mind paying for parking in some locations (none of which were large cities) and loved taking the backroads. We also loved taking the train, bus, ferry or plane to where we wanted to go.

As for Sicily, a car could be a good thing, but the potential Italian car rental and driving pitfalls would still be in play. We were lucky when we went because our daughter lived there (husband at NATO base near Catania) and she could drive us around.

Six weeks in Italy will barely touch the surface of that magnificent country. Having spent 5 weeks in Greece on our last trip there, the same goes for Greece. I'd leave Greece for another trip or add extra time for it.

My husband opted out of European travel about 4 years ago. In 2017, I took the Rick Steves Village Italy tour. I sandwiched it between 6 nights in Rome, 2 nights in Ravenna and 5 nights in Venice before it started and 3 nights in Milan after it ended. I flew into Rome and back from Milan. I chose Village Italy over any of the Best of Italy tours because those itineraries were repetitive for me, but they wouldn't be for you.

Although I'm a pretty good trip planner, that VI tour took us places I'd never even think of, and hooked me on the idea of combining extra time on my own with the very well-planned and informative RS tours.

It's really good that you are starting your planning over a year in advance. The learning curve is steep at first and the more time for planning you have, the flatter it gets.