Off season traveling in Umbria

Will you be driving or relying on trains and buses?

I spent 9 days in Umbria and Tuscany this year with a car, last week of March, early April when sunset was around 7.30. At the beginning of November it will be 5 pm and about 20 minutes earlier at the end. I found the driving slow and all too often difficult. I wrote about my experiences here (scroll down the page a bit to get to the road trip) and a few others chimed in with their own experiences. I made a point of not driving after dark. I only did that once while I was staying in Perugia, after I'd become very familiar with the road.

There wasn't much scenery to speak of when driving. Leaves were just beginning to appear on the trees, the vineyards were just black stumps. From hill towns one did see rolling green hills.

Tourism was just coming back, a majority of the tourists in some places were Italians, many seeing much of their own country for the first time. I would expect November to be quite different. Some restaurants and lodgings may be closed for the "dead" time after the shoulder season and before the Christmas holidays. My B&B owners in Venice said that was when they generally took a long vacation.

Given all that, I suggest you go to large towns and cities where you'll be sure to have things to do after dark and lots of choices for dinner. Some of the little towns I stayed in had very few restaurants.

Last November and December we visited Umbria for almost 5 weeks. Since we often go to Italy in November, we were not surprised by a few restaurants and bakeries being closed for a week or more, but what did surprise us and mess up our plans a bit was that it seemed like an unusual number of museums and churches were closed that would normally have been open. Several were only open on the weekend. The big art museum in Perugia was closed for renovations and a church in Spello containing a big famous fresco was not open when its website and its own sign outside said it would be open (there were a bunch of us waiting to enter when it finally opened).

We think that these were COVID-related issues --- not enough staff people to keep them open. Perhaps this won't be a problem this November, but who knows? You could try phoning ahead of time to find out about closures/different hours, but I wouldn't count on there being people to answer the phone. In a small town whose name I forget, the church with cool frescoes we came to see was closed and we had to go find somebody to get another person to go hunt up a third person who had the key. They were all very nice about it, so we were glad we persisted and were able to see the paintings.

The restaurants that were open were open normal hours. We rarely shop except for ceramics so I didn't notice stores being closed early --- the ceramics shops in Deruta were all open but had hardly any customers.

We think that the advantages of November travel FAR outweigh any problems, including the weather (which luckily has always been great for us!).

Nancy,
Thanks for your comments. We’re going to Umbria in October, starting in Orvieto and then after a week or so, heading north to the Lakes area and glad that things seem almost normal. We typically travel in Europe in October when things are quieter and occasionally things are closed but generally nothing to seriously disrupt our trips.

We are currently in Tuscany visiting hill towns and were just in Umbria doing the same. Obviating can’t comment on opening hours in the fall but I can chime in that driving has been stressful and exhausting. My husband couldn’t make it on this trip so I am driving a stick shift, which I hadn’t driven in decades, up and down very windy roads using a GPS.

I wouldn’t really try to get an automatic for driving I. Umbria and Tuscany. They were all out when we tried. And I would add that it is a bit of a hassle looking for parking at the bottom of the town. Some places have been easier but places like Orvieto and Montepulciano were really tough because we didn’t know where we were going.

Sorry mean to say I WOULD really try to get an automatic. And obviously not obviating.

Ooops. I see that I didn't actually include the link to my thread. It's here.