Tuscany vs Venice

9-10 day tours feel short from my perspective, so it seems ideal to add time on your own afterward. If you take the RS Heart of Italy tour, it's easy to take a direct train from Florence to Venice and spend a few days there before flying home. (Avoid backtracking by booking a multi-city plane ticket, into Rome and home from Venice. If you can choose a not crack-of-dawn flight from Venice, you'll have more options for getting to the airport.)

After the V-F-R tour, options to visit Tuscany or Umbria on your own are wide open but less obvious, some accessible by train and bus and some better by car.

lms,

I'd also recommend the method that Laura suggested. Add some time before or after your tour (or both) to visit places not covered by the tour. In any case, it's a good idea to arrive a few days prior to the start of a tour to allow for any unexpected flight delays and also recover from jet lag. Use those few days to see sights not covered by the tour.

Two different environments, Tuscany is beautiful and calm and breathtaking, we toured by car. Venice is tourist land and busy but also beautiful. Depends on what you want your experience to be. Umbria is memorable especially the hill town of Orvieto.

How about the 10day Venice, Florence, Rome Tour? We are doing this in October. We are flying into Venice a couple days early to have extra time there and when the tour is over, we are staying extra in Rome to see Orvieto, then heading to Sorrento for 5 nights to see the coast, Pompeii, Ravella, and then taking the train back to Florence to see Siena and more of Tuscany and flying out of Florence. Seems easy to arrive early or stay later to see things.

I think a lot of people wanting to do one of Rick's excellent escorted tours in Italy would face the same dilemma.
9 days (too short) vs 17 days (too long). If you could join the 17 day tour on Day 5 in Venice then that would be perfect for you. Perhaps RS should consider a 13 day escorted option.

Given the current choices I would, as Laura suggests, book the 9 day Heart of Italy then add on your own freewheeling ...
Before: South of Rome to the Amalfi Coast - Naples, Pompeii, Sorrento, Capri, Positano
After: North from Florence to Venice, perhaps also including Bologna/Padova/Verona.

Lots of independent ideas. Enjoy.

A big problem with these tours is you run around to all these different parts of Italy and never get to really spend any time in one place. You can easily spend a week in Venice and feel like there is still more to see. Even more so with Rome. I'd slow down, limit your scope and decide that you can always come back.

I could tour and enjoy Italy for one year without being bored. I personally only take tours in countries where most people do not know English or a language I understand or in a country where I would feel unsafe or whose culture I do not know.
I might however like to be guided in some museums or places when I have knowledgeable people in history, art guiding me and who make me discover an artist I do not know. I however hate walking in a city with a group of more than 8 persons, not being able to stop where I feel like and not deciding myself where I would stop for lunch.

In that sense, if rick steve tours are tours with more than 8 persons, I would not be able to stand it for more than 5 or 6 days.