Italy,
Your Way.

Two days in Rome requires choices — the city has more to offer than any itinerary can accommodate — and the right choices make the difference between a good visit and one that changes how you think about history. The ancient city comes first: the Colosseum and the Roman Forum with pre-booked timed entry, the Pantheon — still functioning as a church, still astonishing after two thousand years — and the Capitoline Museums for those who want the full ancient context. The Vatican requires an early start and a pre-booked ticket for the Sistine Chapel — non-negotiable. The northern historic centre — Piazza Navona, the Campo de' Fiori, the Trevi Fountain — is best explored in the afternoon when the light softens. The Trastevere neighbourhood across the Tiber is where the evenings belong: narrow lanes, ivy-covered walls, and the trattorias that have been feeding Romans since before most countries existed. The cacio e pepe in the right place in Trastevere is one of the defining food memories of this trip. The supplì near the Pantheon and the artichoke alla romana from the right Jewish quarter restaurant are the snacks to build the days around. Two days in Rome ends with the understanding that you need to come back for longer — which is always the case.

Elba arrives as a complete change of character from Rome — the Mediterranean light, the unhurried pace, and the extraordinary coastal beauty that the more famous Italian islands have largely lost to mass tourism. The island is thirty kilometres long and twenty wide; the mountain at its centre, Monte Capanne, divides the island into two entirely different coastlines. Portoferraio — the hilltop capital with its Medici fortifications, its Napoleon residence (Villa dei Mulini), and its harbour fish market — is the natural base. The western coast is the most dramatic and least developed part of the island: beaches accessible by narrow road or most beautifully by boat, the granite coastline, and the wine estates of the Sant'Andrea hills where the local Aleatico — a sweet red made from a grape variety found almost nowhere else in Italy — is made in small quantities and worth seeking out. The south coast offers wider, sandier beaches and the kind of unhurried morning that Elba does particularly well. Three nights gives you all of this without rushing any of it. The departure back to the mainland is always later than planned because leaving Elba, once you've been there, requires a specific kind of resolve.

Lucca is the discovery of this itinerary — the stop that people arrive at with modest expectations and leave evangelical about. A perfectly preserved medieval city enclosed by Renaissance-era walls — four kilometres of them, wide enough for the tree-lined avenue along the top — Lucca functions as a genuinely Italian town rather than a tourist destination. The car-free historic centre is navigated on foot or by bicycle, the piazzas are filled with locals rather than tour groups, and the restaurants serve the particular Lucchese food tradition — garlic-free, as the story goes, because of a medieval dispute with the garlic merchants of nearby Pisa — that differs meaningfully from the rest of Tuscany. The Piazza dell'Anfiteatro — an oval piazza built on the foundations of a Roman amphitheatre, its curved buildings still following the ellipse of the original structure — is one of the most extraordinary urban spaces in Italy. Hiring bicycles and cycling along the walls is one of the great simple pleasures of Italian travel: the views of the city's towers and the Apuan Alps to the north, the light through the linden trees, and the particular feeling of moving through history without effort. The day trip to Pisa is an hour by train — fast, cheap, and infinitely more pleasant than basing yourself in Pisa itself. The Piazza dei Miracoli — the tower, the cathedral, and the baptistery — is genuinely extraordinary in the early morning before the tour groups arrive, and the tower itself is a remarkable thing to stand at the top of and look back across the city with the Apennines behind it. Two nights in Lucca, with the Pisa day trip built into the itinerary, is consistently one of the parts of this trip that people mention most when they get home.

Florence requires pre-booking and early starts — the city's major attractions are among the most visited in Europe and the difference between arriving at opening time with a ticket and arriving at midday without one is the difference between an extraordinary experience and a crowded frustration. The Uffizi Gallery — three hours minimum, timed entry booked well in advance — covers Botticelli, Raphael, Titian, Leonardo, and Caravaggio. The Accademia houses Michelangelo's David, which is significantly more extraordinary in person than any photograph suggests. The Duomo complex — the cathedral, the dome, the baptistery, and the campanile — rewards a full morning: Brunelleschi's dome, completed in 1436 without scaffolding, remains one of the most remarkable structures ever built, and the climb to the top is 463 steps worth taking. The Ponte Vecchio, lined with goldsmiths' shops since the fourteenth century, leads to the Oltrarno neighbourhood on the south bank of the Arno — the essential counterpoint to the institutional north bank, with artisan workshops, neighbourhood wine bars, the Boboli Gardens, and the restaurants where the bistecca alla Fiorentina is cooked properly over charcoal. The Bargello for Donatello's sculpture, Santa Croce where Michelangelo, Galileo, and Machiavelli are buried, the Mercato Centrale, and the Piazzale Michelangelo at sunset fill the remaining time beautifully. Florence rewards those who leave room between the galleries for the city itself — the aperitivo hour, the street life, and the particular Florentine elegance that distinguishes it from every other Italian city.

Venice is the most improbable city ever built — and the one where the gap between photograph and experience is widest in both directions. The photographs don't capture what Venice is like at six in the morning when the light is extraordinary and the lanes are empty, or the feeling of arriving by water and watching the city materialise around you. The challenge is navigating it away from the crowds — which concentrate almost entirely between St Mark's Square and the Rialto Bridge — and into the quieter sestieri where Venice's actual character still lives. St Mark's Basilica requires pre-booked entry and an early start to experience the gold mosaic interior in something approaching the right silence. The Doge's Palace and a vaporetto ride down the Grand Canal are the other essentials. The evenings belong to the bacari around Campo Santa Margherita in the Dorsoduro sestiere — eating cicchetti and drinking ombra, the small glasses of local wine that define the Venetian aperitivo tradition. Beyond the main circuit: the Peggy Guggenheim Collection and the Punta della Dogana in Dorsoduro; the Jewish Ghetto in Cannaregio; and a trip to Murano or Burano, which offers a completely different perspective on the Venetian lagoon. A gondola through the smaller canals — in the early morning when the light is extraordinary and the water is still — is, despite its reputation, a genuinely beautiful way to move through the city. Venice ends the trip at exactly the right pace: slightly overwhelming, impossible to process fully, and immediately wished back as soon as you leave.