Hello, my family and I will be in Savona for 9 hours as one of our stops on our cruise. I've been looking into what to do and it doesn't look like there is really a lot to do in Savona. I was wondering if it would be better to do a short trip to a neighboring town? My family includes myself, wife, and our two 15 year old daughters. We all enjoy art, history, and museums so any recommendations would be great, thank you.
Posted by
Washington DC
28450 posts
I am not at all familiar with Savona (check Trip Advisor's Things to Do list), and I don't know how much time you'll need to get from the port to the Savona rail station. I see that you can get all the way to Sanremo (which is close to the French border) in 66 to 92 minutes by train, so any Italian coastal town west of Savona that has a train station should be within reach. I believe Sanremo is quite a pretty coastal resort town, but I don't know about museums there. Try checking TripAdvisor's Things To Do list for Sanremo to see if there is enough there to interest you. You can also Google for photos.
Similarly, you can get to the major port city of Genoa by train in no more than an hour. Genoa certainly has museums, palaces, etc. to fill your port time. I suspect that I will be your best option, but I haven't spent enough time there to offer personal guidance. Again, check TripAdvisor. Genoa would be a geat place to try pasta with pesto, as it's a Ligurian specialty.
The part of the Ligurian Coast most often visited by Americans is beyond Genoa and close to 2 hours from Savona by train, if not farther. To me, that would be pushing it for a self-planned port excursion, given that it would be completely your responsibility to get back to the ship on time.
There may be some good options much closer to Savona that fall in the "cute little coastal town" category, though it doesn't sound as if that's the sort of place you're looking for. So if you haven't already done so, Google shore excursions Savona and see what is on offer. In many cases you can replicate those commercial offerings yourself at lower cost, using public transportation. Or, with 4 of you, a taxi for part of the day might be quite reasonable.
You can check rail schedules and fares on the Trenitalia website. If our travel dates are too far out and you can't yet see the schedule, choose an earlier date on the same day of the week. You need to use the Italian spelling of city names, so "Genova" rather than "Genoa".
For Genoa the fare on the regional trains (which is most of them) will be 9.80 euros round-trip per person (4.90 euros one way). I don't know whether there's a fare reduction for your daughters; there may well be. If you luck into a chance to take one of the express trains, the one-way fare will be 9.50 euros. A possible advantage of the slower regional trains is that they probably all make multiple stops in Genoa, so you can choose the one that gets you closest to your first planned stop. Google Maps will help you figure out where things are located.