air fares

Go to farecompare.com and use the "where to go" option. You can make it list European cities according to price from your home airport. Almost invariably your least expensive destination in Italy will be Rome or Milan, because those are the busiest routes and therefore have the most competition.

One of the ways to reduce your fare is to pick certain airports. When planning my upcoming May trip, I originally wanted to fly into Naples and home from Venice (I fly from Seattle). The fares were running around $1350. After getting some advice on these boards I changed to Seattle-Milan / Rome-Seattle and booked tickets for $1007. Hope that helps!

Thanks for the tip! New to the site and in the planning process myself.

I usually make up a couple of 'fly into/out of' options for the trip i want to take, and then use tripadvisor.com (an aggregate site) and then began checking daily/other day about 5 months out to get an idea of the prices. After a few weeks you'll see things start to fluctuate, and then one magic day the price will plummet...buy! buy! buy!We have paid less than $700 roundtrip out of Charleston S.C. (hardly a hub!) for our 2009 trip into Malaga/out of Barcelona, 2010 into Dublin/out of Limerick, and 2011 (upcoming) into Frankfurt/out of Prague trips. It does take some time and patience, but also can save you some serious $$$ !!

When are you traveling and out of where?