How long to see Rome, Florence, Venice, Cinque Terre?

Do you have the RS Italy 2010 book? He lays out how many days he suggests for each of the cities you mention.

No. I have read his Italy 2008. I'd prefer to know what several people think instead of only Rick Steves.

The question of 'how long' is a tricky one as it depends on one's personal preferences. I could easily spend a full 2 weeks in Rome and not be bored. Others could do the same with Florence, but while I do love Florence I'm ready to leave after 3 or 4 days.

From a purely tourist perspective, Rick's the expert and his advice is probably what you should follow.

To give you an idea of how much there is in Rome, we had three days and we managed to see: Spanish Steps, Trevi, Piazza Navona, Pantheon, Colosseum/Forum/Palentine, Borghese, Vatican Museum, St. Peters' + the Dome, the Trastevere neighborhood, Trajan's Column/forum, and St. Peter's in Chains with the Moses statue. It helped that it was November, so the crowds were few and we could move pretty quickly, and also helped that I had been there the year before and somewhat knew my way around. But there were still at least half a dozen places I wanted to go to that we missed.

Given what you've expressed an interest in doing, I would probably say 4 days Rome, 2 days Florence, 3 days CT, and 2 days Venice. Florence could easily fill another 2 days though.

I would suggest 3 days for Venice, 4 days for florence and 6-7 days for Rome with a day trip to Pompeii. I've never been to Cinque Terre so can't speak to that.

I suggest if you have 10 days or less to cut out one of your destinations. You won't have time to visit more than 3 cities in 10 days with all the travel time that's involved.

Donna

This looks like a two weeks trip to me. If you haven't been to Italy before, allow 3 days for each.

I would suggest flying into Rome and flying out of Venice. I would further suggest, 5 nights, 6 days in Rome. This would include a long one-day side trip to Naples and Pompeii. On Day 6, take the local train to Orvieto. Later that day, take the train to Siena. 2 nights in Siena. Short day trip by local bus to San Gimigiano. On day 8, take the SITA bus to Florence. 4 nights, 5 days in Florence. On day 13, take the train to the CT. 2 nights 3 days in the CT. On day 15, take the 6hr train ride to Venice (7:52am train out of La Spezia via Bologna). 3 nights, 4 days in Venice. Depart Venice Marco Polo airport.

Looks like 17 nights. Except for the Rome part, we've done the remainder in 2 weeks.

On our 1st trip we spent 18 days in Italy. We wanted to hit the highlites, doing it Rick's way. Flew into Rome, spent 3 nights, with a hectic itinerary, and jet lag to go with it. Barely enough time. Took a train to the Cinque Terre and de-compressed for 4 days. Train to Florence for 2 nights, followed by bus to Siena for 4 nights (a good base for seeing Tuscany). Then a train to Venice for 3 nights. Flying out at Marco Polo Airport.

Definitely fly into Rome and out of Venice. Try not to have too early a flight out of Venice, otherwise you may have to take the water taxi to the airport instead of the Vaparettos (water buses). We had to take a water taxi, and it was a fun experience (saw the sunrise, kids going to school, adults with briefcases going to work, lots of work boat activity, and the back canals, etc) but more costly at the early hours (they added an early morning surcharge). After we got off the water taxi they were trying to sell rides to the airport, but you can just walk it if you have the energy. We did 4 nights in Rome on our last trip which was enough for me,but my husband would have loved more. Three nights in CT seems adequate leaving 2 full days for hiking the trail and taking the ferry too. We then went to Venice and rented a house boat for a week, so we were not your usual visitors to the Venice. If staying in Venice, I would suggest at least 2 nights.

I would do the opposite and fly into Venice and out of Rome, mainly because the Venice flights back to the US all seem to be really early in the morning and to us Venice is a great place to get over jetlag and gives you a slower easier start to Italy. For us 2-3 nights in Venice is enough, 3 nights in Florence, 2 nights in CT, we could then spend oodles of time in various areas of Tuscany and Rome. I think it really depends on the sites you want to see as to how much time you need for each area. Don't forget to allow time for wandering and down time in various places and try to be flexible in case one site really grabs your attention or if it doesn't and you are ready to move on. The trouble with these types of recommendations is how subjective this all is, everyone has different interests. My best example is the Spanish Steps area in Rome, some love it but for us its only seen as we make our way to other sites if we happen to go that way, however, you get us to the Pantheon and we can spend hours there while others are done in 15 minutes.

The flights out of Rome are very early as well. If your flight home is on a non-stop flight on an U.S. carrier, you can fly out later in the morning. U.S. carriers fly non-stop into many of the major airports (Heathrow, Paris, Zurich, Rome, many others) by late morning. They turn them around in about 2hrs and fly non-stop home to the U.S. Many airports in Europe do not have the inbound or outbound non-stop U.S. flights. Thus, you depart very early from many airports to get to the airports that do for your afternoon departures back to the States. So if your flight back home is out of London, Paris, Zurich, etc. you will depart very early from Italy to make these connecting flights.

Rome has the most inbound and outbound U.S. non-stops in Italy. Pisa has the Delta flights but I think that they only fly from Kennedy in N.Y. I'm not sure about Milan. I don't think that there are any other such airports in Italy.

Note that our home airport in Sacramento, CA is much the same. We have to depart at 6:00am to get us to major hubs (SFO, LAX, Denver, Dallas, etc) so that we can connect to larger planes for the longer flights.