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Venice, Florence and Rome -- take tours?

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Need some advice on tours for Venice, Florence and Rome in the very near future:

Arriving in Venice Thursday morning at 7:30 and leaving for Florence Saturday morning (arriving Florence at 11 am) then leaving Florence on Tuesday morning (arriving Rome at 11 am) --We have 1.5 days Venice, 2.5 days Florence and 3.5 days Rome -- I am counting days not nights! Since we are short on time I was planning on taking tours with Walks of Italy -- it will still leave us time to ourselves but we will see some of the major sights.

Venice -- St Marks and Doge's Palace -- I already have the tickets for the Secret Itinerary and tickets to St Marks but I am wondering if I will miss much without a tour. We also want to go to the Jewish Ghetto and just basically get lost walking around Venice.

Florence -- Best of Florence walking tour with David and Duomo

Rome -- Pristine Sistine, Coliseum, and Rome like a local

All of these are the short one (3 -3.5 hours) -- is it worth taking the Venice and Florence tours -- especially Florence since we will be there for full days on Sunday and Monday and a lot of things are closed on Monday. All of these will leave the rest of the day free for us to do what we want.

I will add that we went to London and Paris last year and did not take a tour anywhere and managed to see everything. We are not afraid to do walking (we walked 11 miles in one day in Paris last year!) Due to an illness in the family I was not sure until this weekend if we were going to be able to go -- usually I plan these trips months in advance!

Posted by
195 posts

If you check out Rick Steves' city-specific guidebooks (e.g. the Venice book rather than referencing the general Italy book), he has self-guided tours laid out for you to follow. If my memory serves me correctly, he has one for St. Mark's, which you were asking about. We didn't want to haul 5 books with us to Italy, so for the city-specific books, we checked them out from the library and made copies of the walking tours (we had bought Rick's general Italy guidebook to bring with us). I'm sure you will always learn more with a paid tour (and put in less effort), but we didn't feel like we were missing out on the times when we just used Rick Steves' free resources, so that may be an option for you if you are on a budget/don't like being tied down to tour groups. Be sure to check out his free downloadable audioguides as well...they were a big help. The places you might most want a guided tour would be the Roman Forum (you need to be able to interpret what you are seeing, though we did just use Rick's free audioguide and were fine) and the Vatican (there are miles and miles of halls in the museum...would never attempt to navigate it alone).

PS: We had fun on the Secret Itineraries Tour in Venice...hope you enjoy it!

Posted by
5292 posts

A guided tour in not worth the cost, in my opinion. The RS city guide books should be all you need.

Posted by
20 posts

I think both of you are right!!! We used the RS walking tour in Paris (Marais) and found it be be more than adequate and we weren't tied down. I will still take the tour of the forum and Vatican but do any other tours on our own.

Thanks for your help!

Posted by
2456 posts

I think the Pristine Sistine tour is great, especially from what I have read here about super-crowded conditions during the day at the Vatican. Another tour I enjoyed, and likely could not have done on my own, was Walks of Italy's "Catacombs, Crypts and Caverns," or something close to that. It went to three sites, and included a comfortable tour bus between them. It would have hard to do that on my own using public transportation. And of course the guide was very good. Do you know that Walks of Italy offers a 10% discount to RS readers.

Posted by
1970 posts

If you have an extra day, you can do a Roman feast food tour. We did the Eat Italy Rome Trastevere tour. It's a 4 hour strolling and eating tour. It wasn't cheap, but we had a great time and no regrets. It was my birthday splurge. The company also does a Florence and Venice tour. We got to enjoy an area we would not have discovered on our own and the best flavors of food and wine possible. The camaraderie of our group and guide was a pleasure as well.

Posted by
15798 posts

Venice. Take a fan and a bottle of water with you for the Secret Itinerary tour, it gets really warm up there under the roof. You can enter the Doge's Palace before the tour, just be at the meeting point a couple minutes before it begins. If you want to see the Ghetto, take the synagogue tour - it's the only way to see the beautiful synagogue interiors and there's very little to see in the Ghetto aside from that.

You can download Rick's free audio tours for all 3 cities (3-4 for each). They are all pretty short and quite interesting. Print the accompanying pdf maps so it's easier to follow the tours.

In Rome, combine Rick's Ghetto and Trastevere tours - they are next to each other. The visit to the Great Synagogue there is only by tour.

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