Florence and Venice day tours

Having been to both locations and taken both escorted and unescorted tours from both, here are a couple of suggestions.

1) Look at the itinerary of a Rick Steve's tour to see what he feels is a "must see." Better yet, read his guide book(s) or his location description pages on this web site.

2) Go to a tour consolidator like Viator and look at their tours. (Viator doesn't actually conduct these tours, they just package and promote them much like an online travel agent does with airfare.)

That all being said, from Venice it is an easy train trip to Vicenza, Padua and Verona for self-guided tours. You can see Vicenza and Padua together (in that order) in one day while Verona is pretty much a day-long trip by its self.

If traveling in the summer, the Dolomites is a nice day trip outside of Venice but you might want to think about an escorted trip for that.

From Florence, the Chianti region is a big hit if you're a foodie and wine connoisseur. Again, I would recommend an escorted tour so you can enjoy the wine to fullest extent possible.

A good self-guided tour out of Florence is Pisa and Lucca. Both cities are easily reachable via train or local bus. I did the Florence-Pisa-Lucca-Florence loop via the train in an easy day.

Other thoughts:

Reserve an entrance time between 1130 and 1230 for San Marco's in Venice.

The island of Murano is a welcome respite from the crushing crowds of Venice.

Seeing both the Accademia and the Uffizi Gallery in one day can be a bit mentally fatiguing.

Lose yourself in Florence's Mercato Centrale for an afternoon.

I agree with Work2Travel. A good guidebook will have most of that information you are looking for. Rick's guidebooks are not all inclusive but they will cover lots of daytrips from these cities as well as local tour guides and companies that you can hire for the day. If you have only 2-3 days in Venice, you'll probably spend the majority of that in the city with little in the way of side trips with the exception of Murano/Burano. Any more than 3 days can be spent with trips to Padua, Vicenza, Ferrara, Mantua. or Vernona. All of these are good day trip options.

For Florence, you can see most of what you want to do in 2 full days. Any more than that can be spend doing trips out into the Tuscany region. Siena, Volterra, and San Gimignano are great options. Most of the small towns in Tuscnay are hard to get to with public transportation so definitely consider a guided shuttle tour or rent your own car for the day to do the hill towns. Again, Rick's books will have suggestions on tour companies that can get you out to these places.

I hope this helps some.