Italy is a great place to visit – beautiful food, culture, and landscapes. We’d actually been a few times as a family and gotten a good overview, but our boys (with stronger opinions now that they’re both in high school) decided that this is where they wanted to spend their spring break. And furthermore, we found inexpensive tickets on a then-3-year-old airline, so we went with it.
Sightseeing Goals
We had visited some typical sites before – Rome, Florence, Venice. Also, the Amalfi Coast, Lake Como area and Milan. But there’s a ton to see in Italy, and with the guidebook our boys helped pick out some things they wanted to see, which we hadn’t in the past:
- The Cinque Terre area on the Northern Italian coast (we’d planned this for 2022 but got Covid).
- The Leaning Tower of Pisa (a bit cliche, but wanted our obligatory insta).
- Our youngest really wanted to visit the Island of Capri, after seeing pictures.
- Due to bungled reservations, we hadn’t all seen the statue of David in Florence in the past, so wanted to see that if possible. And maybe get Florentine steaks.
Capri and Cinque Terre are quite far apart, and a bit busy to combine for a 1 week trip. But given our son’s enthusiasm, and that our non-stop flight went to Rome, we decided to make it work. That said, Florence/Pisa/Cinque Terre are fairly reasonable to do together.
Note that this describes a 2024 trip, things have gotten busy for us with both kids in the latter part of high school (college visits, activities, etc) – it felt much easier to travel with them when they were younger!
Itinerary
In any case, our itinerary in/out of Rome was as follows:
- Friday: Evening flight from US.
- Saturday: Afternoon arrival in Rome. Evening in Rome.
- Sunday: Full day in Rome.
- Monday: Day trip to Capri from Rome, including late afternoon in Naples. Evening in Rome.
- Tuesday: Train to Pisa to see the tower. Then afternoon train to Cinque Terre.
- Wednesday: Hikes around Cinque Terre
- Thursday: More exploring Cinque Terre.
- Friday: Train to Florence. Reservations at Accademia (David Statue) and at Uffizi Gallery.
- Saturday: Train to Rome, more Rome in afternoon. Evening flight to US.
- Sunday: Recover!
This itinerary would have been way too busy for an initial visit. If this is your first trip, an easy tweak would be to remove Capri and maybe fly out of Florence. That said, a few things that helped make it work:
- Trains are fast from Rome to Florence (82 min), which mitigates the north-south distance.
- Capri is doable as a day trip from Rome (though a long day).
- We had non-stop flights to Rome. (If we were connecting, we would have considered Florence)
- We had been to Rome and Florence before, so we were using Rome partly to de-jet-lag ourselves on the first full day. It was a bonus that we could see old favorites! Similarly, we had been to Florence and the Uffizi Gallery before, but this time we were focused on seeing David and old favorites.
For Cinque Terre, after reading a few guide books, we chose to base in the town of Vernazza, which we liked, though others would have worked as well.
Arriving in Rome
We’ll split this up into posts among destinations, but to start things off, we took our flight to Rome on Friday evening, and arrived on a Saturday afternoon.
We stayed in an Airbnb near the Basilica Santa Maria Maggiore, which worked well for us – it about a 10 minute work from the Termini train station, which was convenient for our early day trip to Capri, yet it was far enough away from the Termini area grittiness to be nice.
In practice, we had a 3pm arrival, and it was closer to 4pm by the time our slightly crazy-driving taxi driver got us to our AirBnB. After dropping our backs off, we took an extended stroll to the Coliseum, and picked up some gelato along the way. By the time we made our way back, it was essentially dinner time, and we were able to get some dinner at a spot around the corner from our place, and then try to sleep off our jet lag. This is probably best case for how a late afternoon arrival works, just enough time to see a few things and settle in.
More From Adventures of the 4JLs
Keep reading our travel blog for more adventures in Italy:
Adventures of the 4 JLs 
This trip looks so fun! I visited Rome years ago, but I’ve been wanting to go back at the next opportunity I can get. This time, I’ll have to plan on going to Capri and exploring around there. I can’t wait to continue reading on about your adventure!
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