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Travel from Florence- to Tuscany and up to CT-- newbie

Posted by on

hello,
I have seen many great threads in the forums on best places to go within Tuscany. My issue is where can I easily pick up a car in florence that is easy to leave the city. I am definitely very intimidated about driving in any of the bigger cities! I had been told that there was a car rental location on via del Gelsomino, but it is only open on saturday's and we would be picking up on Thursday morning. Does any one have any suggestions? We will be taking 2 days driving around Tuscany with Pienza as a home base, and then need to get to CT. I was thinking we should drive to LaSpezia- but not sure if that is an easy drive given we are new to the country and definitely intimidated as two middle aged women driving in Italy! Would we be better off dropping the car somewhere else?

If we are interested in a nighttime excursion in Tuscany where we could have a paid driver- to take us to dinner etc- how would we go about finding a driver?
thanks again for your help!
Lisa H.

Posted by
1054 posts

How about the Florence airport to pickup the car?

For your 2nd part about a paid driver, I just got back from Tuscany last week and was there for 3 weeks. I used Pierangioli travel for a transfer between 2 small towns while i was based in Montalcino and then another day for a tour out into the country. Our driver/guides Giovanni and Mario were great. You can contact them about some information. http://www.montalcinotravel.com/index.php?lg=en&p=home Montalcino isn't that far from Pienza. You can also ask the place in Pienza you are staying at if they know any car service companies based out of Pienza too.

Posted by
8371 posts

We picked up our rental car at Hertz on Sansovino--a couple of miles from the train station. We took a cab from the train station. They gave us easy instructions to the south to avoid any ZTL's. If you're going north, west or east, Sansovino takes you straight to the motorway. Kemwel and AutoEurope are consolidators that often arrange for the same cars cheaper than Hertz's rates.

We try to avoid airport pickups due to additional tolls, taxes, etc. driving up the rental prices. They're good places to turn cars into, however.

Driving in Tuscany is very easy, and the roads are well paved and directions marked. We didn't even have road maps, and had no problems. We were covering the 20-30 miles south and southwest of Florence--Poggibonsi-Certaldo-San Gimignano-Volterra, and would suggest visiting this area. (Siena is best done via bus from Florence as a day trip due to congestion and poor parking.)

If you're going to the C/T, you'd do best to drop the car in LaSpezia and catch the local train northwest.

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