Why go all the way to Umbria or
Tuscany for a villa vacation and miss out on the opportunity to visit some of the great Italian cities too? By adding on a few extra days in a hotel before or after the villa vacation, it is possible to include a few days of delightful urban sightseeing and cultural crawl to complement the villa stay. Bethany, Lidy,
and I completed our two-week exploration of the villas and hotels in Umbria with such an add-on in both Florence and Rome.
We drove from our Umbrian Villa Salicotta, located just outside of Cortona, to Florence along the Autostrada in an easy ninety minutes. Be sure to get good directions from your villa to where ever you will be staying in the city. The roads in Italy are well marked, but if you don’t read Italian, the signs are essentially meaningless. I would caution even the most adventurous about driving in Florence in particular. Florence makes navigating around Boston seem like a walk in the park. We dropped the rental car off at the downtown Hertz location in Florence and took a taxi to the Florence train station. We could have taken the taxi all the way to our hotel destination, but we needed to stop at the train station for a “look see” and to purchase tickets for our later trip to Rome.
Bethany, Lidy, and Matt
