Fall 2023 Italy Trip

For ‘North’, how far north do you have in mind?

We’re very flexible. Would like to be able to visit Lake Garda…but we can stay within a train or car ride.

In that case, Verona could be good. You could take the train from there to Peschiera del Garda, then a ferry to various points along the lake. You could also take the train to Vicenza, Padova, Venezia…

There's a huge distance between Lake Garda and Calabria, and Abruzzo is in between. I'd suggest using ViaMichelin.com to check estimated driving times from potential bases to places you'd like to see and the Trenitalia website (https://www.trenitalia.com/en.html) for travel times by train.

We'd need to know more about the places you want to see in order to suggest practical bases. It won't be possible to choose just two bases and make day trips to Lake Garda, Abruzzo and Calabria.

In general, I don't think it's practical to stay in small towns without a car if the idea is to travel around to other small towns. Transportation isn't usually set up that way; buses fan out from large towns and cities. If you want to see a lot of small, unspoiled towns, that pretty much calls for a car. I suppose you might manage Lake Garda by taking boats around the lake; I haven't tried that myself, but it would work for Lake Como.

Thank you for your response! So if we rented for 10 days near Bologna or Milan, could we travel easily to the lakes region for a few days?
And then if we rented near Rome for 10 days, could we tour the south in 10 days-like Calabria/Abruzzo/Amalfi coast?

We were just in Rome, and I would never ever drive there. They are all crazy! Ditto for driving on the Amalfi coast, only that's even worse due to the very steep narrow roads.

If you look at Google Maps, it's 3-1/2 hours of driving from Rome, through Naples, to Amalfi. That's not a day trip from Rome.

I'm not clear on whether you're still thinking about just one base in each area; I don't think that's going to work well.

As an example of distances and time you are dealing with, it is a 3 hour drive, mostly inland, between Salerno at the southern end of the Amalfi Coast and Cosenza, in Calabria. Pull up a map program like Google Maps and use some towns and places you want to visits to see what transportation is like for possible day trips. Maybe stay near Salerno and daytrip to the Calabrian towns of interest. Depends on your tolerance for driving. I would not drive on the Amalfi Coast road.

Castel di Sandro in Abruzzo is a 2+ hour drive from Salerno so could be a stop on the way farther north, but from there to Lake Garda is a very long drive of over 8 hours. You could certainly base in Verona or Vicenza and day trip to the lake as well as throughout the Veneto.

All in all I think you need three stops, minimum, to cover your wishes: Salerno, Castel di Sandro (which looks beautiful!) for at least a couple of nights, and a smaller city in the Veneto like Vicenza or Verona.

By the way, in the autumn, start in the north and move south,

All very helpful thank you. I should’ve stated that we intend to use the train system as much as possible versus driving everywhere, and it’s not imperative that we see all these locations. This was just the beginning of our planning!
Thanks!

Consider spending some days in Umbria (Perugia, Orvieto and Assisi for example).

Verona is nice but I don't see opening 10 days there.