Self-guided vs paid tours in Verona, Venice, Florence & Rome

Uffizi's & Colosseum's audio guide is good, or download Rick Steve's. We booked the Vatican's tour on their website, very good. Highly recommend pre-booking your tickets for all 3 to avoid lines!

There's no need to do a guided tour in Verona. I would pay for a guided tour for what interests you the most and what you're not able to research ahead of time - art, for instance. But, check out apps, guide books, etc. to see what you want to supplement.

Are you aware that Juliet's Balcony is simply a tourist attraction, nothing to do with the story?

There's a burial site for a fictional character? Is Romeo interred with her?

I used Rick's free audio tours for Venice, Florence, Rome and Pompeii and enjoyed them all. They are interesting without being overly long. In Verona, I went to Juliet's house because I was passing by and had the Verona Card. The balcony/patio is usually filled with tourists taking tasteless photos. The inside of the house was rather interesting as a reconstruction of a 16th-17th century noble's residence. I'd rate it rather low on the scale of sights in Verona.

The Secret Itineraries Tour was one of the highlights of Venice for me. I did it in winter and it was freezing cold. In summer it's swelteringly hot, so get the earliest tour you can, take water and a fan with you.

I don't recommend the Vatican Museums audio guide. It gives a lot of information (if you want to know more about individual pieces), but it means you have to go back to the beginning to return it. In other places, the audio guides are usually about €4-5, not much money and I usually enjoy them, especially since it often makes me look at something differently or look at something that I would have passed by. Inexpensive walking tours are often a very good way to see a good bit of a city and learn some history and interesting facts.

We've used the RS guide books to do walking tours on our own in Venice and Rome. They are sufficient, and the downloadable audio guides are probably a little better. Not need, in my opinion, to take a guided tour in Verona at all. Just use the RS guide book info and that should be enough. Since you want to keep expenses low, perhaps you should do most on your own and spend money just on the things you that are of great interest and you want more details and in depth info about.

With a good guidebook and/or audio guides, you should be fine on your own. It also helps to read as much as possible in advance about the places you'll be going to so you have a little background.

Unless you are staying 5-10 days or more in these places and want to do something in great depth, or something very unusual, I think the RS guidebooks will be more than fine. Even without his audio tours, we've found his descriptions very detailed and his directions to be fail safe. Our first trip to Italy (16 days split evenly between Rome and Florence) all we had were the torn-out pages from our RS Italy book. I was able to plan our daily sightseeing & museum itinerary before we left home (including coffee break and lunch locations) using nothing but his pages. We took one of his recommended guided walking tours on the first day we arrived in each city, just for a general overview, but the rest we did easily on our own because the RS books were so thorough.

Still in Italy and have been to Rome, Florence, Venice with a few days in Montepulciano. Was in Verona on last trip. You do not say when you plan to go to Italy and this would impact my advice. We are here in summer only because of school schedules, otherwise I would travel in late fall when it is a bit quieter - and cooler!

I am a big fan of the Rick Steves audio guides. My entire family has the app and we have used many of them on this trip. But for a few sites I think a tour was well worth the money. In Rome, the Vatican is so extremely crowded that it was sometimes difficult to see anything, even with a tour. We did the Walks of Italy Pristine Sistine tour and if the Vatican is a priority, I would highly recommend this. I don't think it would have been worth going without the very experienced guide getting us in early and through the crowds. We did a Context tour, Antica Rome, of the coliseum, Palentine hill and the forum. Extremely well done, informative and interesting. The guide kept my teen daughters (and their parents) engaged and interested for 4 hours in 95+ degrees - no small feet.

We did the Secret Itineraries Tour yesterday and had a great time - did the 9:55am tour and got to enjoy the Palace before the heat. Again, had a great guide, which was wonderful. A highlight of our entire trip was a "Cichetti Row" with Row Venice. Our family got rowing lessons of a traditional Venetian boat (an early version of a gondola) and then rowed ourselves from bar to bar in the quiet back canals, tasting Venetian snacks and wine along the way. Great fun for the kids and grownups (we made the kids do most of the rowing).

In Florence, I think the Uffizi audio tour would be a good idea. We tried to use the RS audio tour but because of extensive renovations in the museum (that will not be done for years) more than half of what RS talks about has been moved. Hopefully, the Uffizi guide is more up to date?? Or, if this is a priority for you, get a guide/tour for that museum. The RS audio for Accademia was perfect.

I don't think you need to have special tours for Verona - use RS and try and explore more out of the way parts of that lovely town.

For other sites, I would highly recommend reading RS Italy and making reservation for as many of the sites ahead of time as you can. I tried whenever possible to only schedule one "blockbuster" site per day, but we had two full weeks to work with.

Another thing - we have found the restaurant recommendations in Ricks books to be consistently very good! Food in Italy is amazing but there are so many choices - it's good to have it narrowed down a bit.