My husband and I recently returned from an amazing trip to Italy! We prepared for over a year for our Italian adventure! Researching, saving and planning. Despite how much I prepared before the trip a few things still stocked me. Below is a list of travel tips for Italy (some I learned before the trip and a few tips we picked up along the way).
1. You walk a lot! We averaged over 24,000 steps a day! (Back at home I barely reach 10,000 a day.) So bring comfortable shoes. I brought converse sneakers, but wished I would have brought tennis shoes.
2. Showers are small. Very small.
3. Bring reusable water bottles. In nearly every major city (Rome, Florence, Venice and I am sure others) we found natural spring water fountains that you can use to fill up your water bottle or take a quick drink from.
4. Bring or buy Vitamin C when you are there. Your body will thank you.
5. Bring more cash. I read many blogs/articles that claimed the “big” cities in Italy takes plastic, but from our experience over 50% of restaurants, tourist attractions and souvenir shops didn’t take plastic.
6. Book a ticket for the sites you really want to see. The lines are crazy long, especially during busy season.
7. Bring your own headphones. Some of the tourist attractions have a separate fee for audio guides. If you are traveling with a companion, just purchase one audio guide and use your headphones in the spare jack.
8. Pack only what you need. (See our 2 week packing list blog post)
9. Have some understanding of the high speed train that runs across Europe . A site that really helped us was Rail Europe. We even booked our train ahead of time!
10. Take advantage of their public transportation (trains,subways,buses).
11. Carry a safety purse and/or wallet. We saw our fair share of pIck pocketing while there. I had my travel purse and Peter carried a wallet with a chain lock. We felt extra safe with these.
12. Don’t order water at a meal unless you want to pay for a bottle water. There’s no such thing as “tap” water at restaurants. A bottle of water ranged from 2E to 6E.
13. Don’t eat the bread served unless you want to pay for it. It usually cost 3E per person for bread.
14. If you order water, you will get asked if you would like still or sparkling water.
15. Try to learn some Italian before you go. You’ll get more respect from the locals for trying. We learned from a free app called Duolingo.
16. Give yourself extra time when trying to arrive somewhere at a specific time (I.e. A tour or train ride). Things move a little bit slower over there. And worst case scenario be prepared to RUN!
17. Bring two converters. You’ll need it for charging your cell phones, iPad, camera, etc. We got ours from Amazon and they worked perfectly. One even have multiple USB plugins so we could charge all small electronics at the same time.
18. If you don’t want to get charged with international data fees make sure you keep your cell phone on airplane mode AND turn off your data before leaving the country.
Have your own tips you’d like that share? Please do so below!
simple2fabulous 