Hoping to take our twice delayed trip December 2021

Pat, no advice for Italy, but lots of good wishes that the third time is the charm!

Have you been to Pisa? There's not much there and much of the area is a little shady. I recommend taking a day trip there from Florence with WALKABOUT FLORENCE - their BEST OF TUSCANY tour goes to 2 towns, lunch at a winery and to Pisa - it's really all you need there. Know that some places/lots of places will be closed 12/24 and 12/25 - so be prepared for that.

Florence and Rome have nice, but small, German-style Christmas markets.

We go to Europe every other year in Dec - we have a trip planned to Austria and Germany 11/26-12/11, but we don't expect European travel to happen this year after all the news that came out this month from WSJ, NYT, Allianz, and EU papers. .

Happy Planning - but I caution you about booking anything that doesn't give you a full refund.

If you’re in Bologna for a few days, you might want to consider a day trip to Ravenna, ~1/2 hour by train, to see the spectacular 5th and 6th century Byzantine mosaics.

We spent 3 weeks in Italy in December 2017. We were never bothered by crowds and the weather was lovely. We needed lighter weight coats (think Fall). We started in Florence and went to Pisa for Day trip. We travelled south to Rome including The Vatican. Again, small crowds and lovely blue skies. We continued to Naples, Sorrento and Sicily. We found people amazingly kind and helpful and the food, sights and wine amazing. If you have specific questions please let me know. We’re hoping to return to Italy in October.

The seven mosaic sites in Ravenna are fabulous, and the historic center is lovely in itself, but the fastest train from Bologna to Ravenna on the current schedule takes 1 hr. 9 min. each way. It's still doable as a day-trip, but I'd recommend an early start to make it possible to see all the mosaics. One of them involves a short bus ride (or taxi) to a location outside of town.

We spent Christmas in Sicily in 2012. The week leading up to that was in Rome, the week after was in Sorrento and surrounding area. Every Italian city and town was decorated with lights, some suspended over the streets. Presepi (manger scenes) are abundant, too. If you’re going to museums, double check for hours of operation.

Rome - We arrived at the Vatican Museums right after they opened one morning, and although there was a long velvet rope maze outside the entrance to handle crowds, we were the only ones there, and marched right inside. The museum got more full as the day went on, but we had an hour with very few others at the beginning. The Sistine Chapel wasn’t very crowded when we reached it, although there was a long, long line that afternoon waiting to reach security to get into St. Peter’s. Weather was in the lower 50’s during the day - cool but not cold. A jacket was sometimes needed, but not a heavy coat.

Sicily - we stayed at an Agriturismo Christmas Eve and Day. There was a huge lunch there Christmas Day, then things wound down and were quiet the rest of the day and evening. Seemed people spent the day with their families, and it wasn’t a day to go out and about on other activities.

Sorrento/Naples/Amalfi coast/Pompeii - week between Christmas and New Year’s, museums were open and had a fair number of visitors. Restaurants were busy. No dining outside at that time of year. At the stroke of midnight on New Year’s, the skies above Sorrento were filled with people’s personal fireworks displays for 20 minutes, then it settled down and was quiet the rest of the night. The next morning, we found out that the ruins at Pompeii, which were originally going to be closed all day, were going to be open until 1pm, a short day. We went, and except for a huge, loud Russian tour group, there was almost nobody else there. Again, check hours and open days, then recheck.

Our Rome trip planned for September 2020 got cancelled, as you’ve m experienced, but we’ve scheduled a new trip this coming late September, starting in Bologna. Hope our trip happens, and yours does, too!

Spent Christmas in Florence. Watched Its A Wonderful Life dubbed in Italian on Christmas Eve.
Found Florence less festive that I thought it would be at Christmas.

I wouldn’t take it for granted that the temps will be so mild - friends of mine went to Florence for Xmas some years ago and it was bitterly cold. Make sure you check the long range weather forecast before you do your packing,!

For solid information on the range of weather possible at that time of year, take a look at the actual, historical, day-by-day climate data on the website timeanddate.com. The data goes back about ten years. I recommend checking at least the most recent three years; five would be better. I think actual data like that is a lot more useful where temperature is concerned than monthly averages. A lot of the monthly averages offered on the Internet cover periods that ended many years ago, and we all know weather has gotten wackier recently.

I confess to using the climate-summary chart in each city's Wikipedia entry for information on rainfall statistics (inches of rain and number of rainy days per month); I hope those are a reasonable reflection of current reality but cannot vouch for that.

If you can keep scratching your itch a little longer. I've spent a few weeks in Tuscany around September/October, and the weather was ideal. A couple of locals told me that spring is their favourite time of the year by far.

I was in Italy late December-early January, and loved it, but do concur about the cold. I had my winter coat, fortunately, and wound up buying a warm hat. Totally worth it - the light was beautiful, crowds much smaller, holiday traditions enjoyable and interesting to experience. It was particularly fun to wander around after dark, to see the light shows projected on the buildings.

We were in Rome over New Year’s I to early January a year ago. Rome was very crowded at New Year’s with Italian visitors packing the piazzas, etc. It was cold enough to wear a down coat and gloves much of the time. The Christmas lights and decorations were very pretty. The lights were small and hung across the streets, charming.

Smart to travel to cities in winter -- even if it is miserable, Florence, Rome etc are filled with wonderful indoor venues. That said. We once spent the first week of January in Florence looking for an apartment to rent for 3 months the following spring/summer. It was quite mild -- light jacket weather and sunny. Entirely unpredictable. We have found spring in Italy similarly unpredictable ranging from cold to delightfully sunny and pleasant.

I would organize your trip so you finish in Rome if you are flying home from there and would do Pisa as a sidetrip from Florence rather than bothering with a hotel there. Nothing ruins the good feeling of a lovely vacation like spending the last day racing back to the city you are flying from. Finish in Rome for a few days and then get a cab to the airport. The more you can reduce logistics the better. Use your arrival day to get to your most distant destination; hotels don't have rooms till afternoon anyway -- use that morning of miserable jet lag to get to Bologna, then go to Florence and do side trips to Pisa and Siena perhaps, then finish with a few days in Rome. We have done this both ways and the race to a city to fly from is always a loser.

Thank you all so much!! You are all very generous and I received great points to be thoughtful about. We have only been to Europe once. A canal boat trip in France. Enough to give us the travel bug.

If I may add, I spent a lovely 36 hours in Pisa. After having miscalculated the departure day from my cooking class in Tuscany, I decided to stay in Pisa and wait for my next travel day. (This was during a month in Italy in 2015) Of course I toured the tower and buildings, but also found the lovely sarcophagi on the grounds, and absolutely charming cafes nearby. I walked around town on the pedestrian only streets and had some of my most memorable people watching from cafes and restaurants of the whole month.