For April vacation we went to Rome and Florence. I ran into one of my friends in town, and he mentioned he is going to Italy in a couple of weeks so told him that I would write up a few things and send it to him.
My wife and I didn’t do much for our big birthdays that happened during Covid and so at the start of this year she decided that the kids will be off to college soon enough so if we don’t take a trip to Italy now, the odds will keep falling. They have the standard Massachusetts April vacation week, which is right in the middle of normal insanity unlike the summer. But, there’s more and more talk about Italy being completely overrun in July/August so she booked flights and hotels and then I proceeded to do no preparation of any sort.
I haven’t been to Europe since my Dad took me as a kid so here’s a bunch of things I found notable:
Passports – we did well here, we had them before Covid in prep for a trip through Canada, the kids were renewed last year. The EU has a new system where you scan your passport on arrival, getting out of the Rome airport only took about 40 minutes. The most interesting part of this to me was that boarding passes were not required for the Atlanta/Rome leg of our flight, with the passport scan they used facial recognition at the gate. The attendant got a scan as we approached and that was it, no checking in.
The train is right at the airport, like a Boston commuter rail but nicer and it goes straight into the Rome train terminal. It was around $8, and works perfectly. Before leaving I had more than one person tell me to be wary on the train for pickpockets and scams. All I can say is that every train and subway I went on was nicer than the worst trains I’ve been on in America so I never felt concerned and we had no issues. In fact, we took the high speed rail from Rome to Florence and it was better than the Acela.
Get the high speed train app and the regional train app so you can buy your tickets on your phone. There were huge lines at baggage claim (40+ people) which are pointless, if you have already loaded the app and played with it a bit you can buy your tickets as you are walking to the tracks.
Tip: if you are traveling with a family and you buy your tickets through the app, you’ll have a bunch of QR codes on your phone that you could scan multiple times as you feed people into the corral. But, every major station we went to had at least one corral that was manned by a security guard who could check tickets. These are armed guards who have bigger things to worry about than confirming a bunch of QR codes on your phone. I would show them the first ticket and they would just wave us all through.
This was the power adapter we traveled with, I got two 2-packs from Amazon so everybody got their own and it worked perfectly. When I got there I realized that it was kind of stupid of me because I left my laptop at home and I didn’t have any devices that needed to be plugged in. I could have just bought a European charger.
Speaking of things to charge, I was really surprised how phones have taken so much of the headache out of international travel. I had two credit cards on my phone where I could label my travel dates so they would have no issues with suspicious charges. And getting credit card exchange rates are not horrible and it beats having to get Euros and changing them back if they don’t get used.
I did have a bunch of cash I wanted to use (when I was closing out my Dad’s estate a guy paid cash for one of his cars so this was an opportunity to finally get rid of a wad of 100’s I had no use for) and there’s a guy at the Uffizi Gallery who has done currency exchange for decades. He was giving 80 Euro for $100 USD with no additional fees.
My friend Kelsey lives in Europe and gave me a bunch of tips – use booking.com as AirBnB is not the leader there. Also try to avoid Uber which is more expensive than Lyft. Also Lyft is affiliated (or maybe now owns?) Freenow, uses existing taxis/limos.
Between Freenow or Uber when there were no other options, we had no trouble getting around the cities. We did a ton of walking. Averaged over 8 miles a day for the trip.
We arrived in Rome Friday morning and had rented an apartment near Re di Roma, which is only a couple of miles from the Coliseum. The A Line of the subway has all the main tourist points. It was a half block from our apartment and passes Coliseum, Spanish Steps (and Trevi Fountain), and goes west to Vatican City. Tap and pay with your phone removes tickets from the loop and works perfectly.
The A line was packed on the weekend, this wasn’t even the busy season but the tourist volume is crazy. For the Coliseum, Vatican City, and Uffizi Gallery in Florence your best bet is to buy tickets (or tours) weeks in advance. We used Viator for booking, it’s a TripAdvisor company and if you are as ill-prepared as I was you can buy your way into tours on short notice. It gets expensive fast, but as this may be once in a lifetime for me I bit the bullet.
Our family has to eat Gluten Free and we were pleased to find that Find Me GF, the app we use for travel at home was fantastic in both Rome and Florence.
We also did a day trip to Livorno because Carin wanted to see the coast and give the kids a day trip experience. I didn’t realize that Livorno is the easiest cruise ship stop that allows tourists to then hop on the train to do a day trip to Pisa and/or Florence. It’s very nice and has an amazing market but if not for wanting to get to the water I would have taken an extra day in Rome instead.
I was also surprised at how many people wear Oud Rose perfumes, at first I thought that was just the smell of the city.
It was a fantastic trip, I was surprised that it was no more difficult than going to a major city in the US. The hospitality stole my heart, everyone treated us well, language was never a barrier, everything from the restaurants to the shops and museums were fantastic. I’ve been posting some photos on IG, check them out there.