Laundry facilities

There's always laundry somewhere. Your hotel may offer it, or you may find a drop off service or a self service option.

We found in Padua and in Cinzano on most recent trip.

Where are you going, as it might be helpful in telling you what's available.

you're asking about the RS tour? probably should ask in the RS tour forum. but actually, you can call the tour office at the number below (note its Pacific time) and ask them

When we were on this tour our hotel in Florence and Cinque Terre provided laundry service. It was not cheap, but I would rather have them do it than give up our sightseeing time.

While I haven't been on the 17 day Best of Italy tour, I have been to most of the places it visits. Florence, Siena and Rome definately have self-service laundromats, and I believe Venice and Monterosso also have them. The ones in Florence are easy to get to and only require about an hour for wash and dry. Another option is to use a lavanderia. At some, you can drop off clothes first thing in the morning and retrieve them washed, dried and folded in the late afternoon or next morning. Cost is higher than a self-service laudromat, but it's still a lot less than what a hotel would charge. Keep in mind though, that sometimes the day's tour schedule doesn't allow enough time for drop-off and pick-up at a lavanderia. Once you know your tour hotels, you can use Google maps to locate nearby laundries. Your guide can also be a resource, but their input will be limited to their past experience. Bottom line, you should have no problem finding places to do laundry on that tour.

dewager,

If you're referring to the RS Best of Italy 17 day tour, there will be a couple of places where you can do laundry. You shouldn't have any trouble finding a laundromat in Florence, and your guide or the hotel staff can provide information on the nearest one. On Day 10 you'll be in Monterosso on your "free day", so will have lots of opportunity to take care of laundry. If believe there's a laundromat in the "new town" and there's definitely one in the "old town", towards the top of Via Roma.

Your guide will be able to provide all the details.

I don't take organized tours. That said, on our recent trip, about a third of the places we stayed had laundry facilities in our room that we could use at no additional charge - it was awesome. Clean clothes every four or five days - a real luxury. We stayed mostly in B&Bs and a few small hotels. We did have to find and buy laundry detergent (which was not as easy as I expected it would be) several times - next trip, we will bring a container with a small amount of laundry detergent from home.

Laundry detergent, called lavatrice, is available in every super market and probably at most mini-markets. It's not expensive. I paid about 2.50 euro for a container of liquid detergent at Conad that's good for 25 loads. Self-service laundromats often have a machine that sells single use packets of liquid detergent, usually costing 1 euro. Liquid laundry detergent seems to be much more common than powdered.

I usually have no problem finding a laundromat near my hotel boy Googling "lavanderia" and the name of the town or city. Some smaller towns will not have public laundry facilities.

Laundry detergent, called lavatrice, is available in every super market and probably at most mini-markets. It's not expensive.

We eventually figured it out. First couple times it was entertaining to try and guess which items in the "cleaning products aisle" were for laundry. At one point my wife pointed to a bottle that I recognized as bleach and suggested we use that to wash our cloths...
Lacking familiar brand logos, we went by a variety of clues. It got easier.

Agree about the liquid versus powder - I don't think we ever saw a single powdered laundry detergent product.

Oh this makes me laugh as I have BEEN THERE DONE THAT. We washed our clothes in Iceland with what turned out to be something similar to Formula 409 or Fantastic type of cleaner. My husband still has the purple underwear to prove it. LOL They were clean but .......

On recent trip, both machines we used automatically added the detergent from a reservoir in the machine. Very handy.

In Rome I found a laundromat via the Internet. For a couple of euros extra an attendant ran the machines while I went
off to enjoy the city. A nice compromise between an expensive hotel laundry service and sitting around with the locals watching your underwear rotate in suds. Google Translate tells me "laundromat" is "lavanderia a gettoni".

Many laundries also use the words "self service" in their signage.