How To Plan A Month In Italy

Organising Accommodation

The type of accommodation you choose for your perfect vacation will be determined by a number of factors. In addition to any budgetry considerations accommodation should be assessed for location, facilities, inclusions and activities.

Our wish list for each destination during our month in Italy had slightly different requirements. Our first night in Sicily we really just needed to sleep. We wanted to be fairly accessible to transport as we would be collecting our rental car the following morning. Where ever possible and provided the pricing is comparable to other options our preference is for rooms with character. Our first night will be spent in a nineteenth century villa with period furnishings and a pool, located within two miles of the centre of the city. We were amazed at how reasonable the cost of this is.

Our second base is at the invitation of our son's host family. We are enormously grateful for their generosity and obviously this has been a big help to our trip budget as well.

From there we will travel to the Amalfi Coast. We have decided to stay a little away from the heavily touristed areas and chose our location for easy access to one of our son's friends who stayed in Australia on a student exchange program last year. In this case we were after a quiet location with easy access to public transport as we will be arriving by train and using local buses to get around during our stay.

The next stage of our journey sees us traveling to Tuscany. We wanted to be in the countryside, in a character location, hopefully with a pool. Since our month in Italy will be in the middle of summer our tentative plan is to get out and about early in the day then spend the heat of the day taking it easy. A place with a pool will be perfect for our needs for this leg.

Finally, we will end our month in Italy in Rome. Our preference is for something fairly central but reasonably quiet as well. On the face of it the apartment I have booked looks pretty good but I guess we won't know how good these places are until we get there. Our family are leaving Rome separately for various reasons which involves at one point our getting our son to the airport for an evening flight then returning the next day for our midday flight. To make things easier we have chosen to book a room close to the airport for our last night in Rome. This turns out to be one block from the sea and although we only need it to sleep, it looks like a lovely place.

I used AirBnB to book most of our accommodation as well as Booking.com. I also used Zuji, Trip Advisor and Lonely Planet for additional research.