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Earlier this year, after 32 years of waiting and planning, my husband and I spent 10 days in Tuscany. Eventually I’ll post highlights of what we visited in Florence, Pisa, Siena, and Livorno, but for starters, I want to offer some suggestions for other travelers, plus the answers to a bunch of questions I didn’t know enough to ask about before we went. If you’re a fan of combining planning with winging it when you travel, you might find some useful information here even if you aren’t heading to northern Italy any time soon.

Planning

I’m an art historian, and I love the Renaissance – so the list of places and artworks I wanted to see in Tuscany has grown very long over the years. With only 10 days, I had to set priorities. I did that by searching each item on the list in Wikipedia, Trip Advisor, the institution’s site, etc., and copy-pasting info (highlights, hours, location, tours) into a separate Word doc. Then I printed the pages out and marked them with 1, 2, or 3 stars for how urgently I wanted to see them.

I carried those print-outs with me to Italy, and took the relevant pages with me on each day’s outings. In defense of carrying paper: I feel like I miss less of what’s going on around me if I have a paper with highlighted passages to look at, rather than doing scroll-and-squint at a cell-phone screen.

Once I had my list of items, I put each one on a color-coded private map in Google Maps, so I’d be able to see at a glance where things are in relation to each other. (Looking at a Google Map is a relatively small amount of scroll-and-squint.) For example: if we visit the Uffizi and have a couple hours free afterwards, what’s within walking distance? Here’s part of my map of Florence.

I flagged the highest-priority items in red, lower priority in orange, lowest priority in yellow. At the end of the day, I changed items we’d visited to black, so I could easily ignore them the next day. Also, I changed the icons to show if the item is a museum, a church, a restaurant, a place with a view, etc.

Instructions for creating a Google Map are here. I make one for every long trip I go on, if I’m in charge of planning it.

Booking tours

My husband and I were traveling on our own, but we knew that some museums are more easily accessible on tours, or at least with advance tickets. Also, we were arriving on New Year’s Eve, and we knew Florence is very crowded during the holidays. So a month or two before we left, Sal booked tours for major museums.

My thinking about the timing was: it would be exhausting to do museums back to back, morning and afternoon, for days on end. Also, I expected museums to be more crowded on weekends, when Italians as well as tourists might be there. So we booked the Accademia (with Michelangelo’s David) combined with a climbing-the-Duomo tour early on the morning of Tuesday 1/2/24, two days after our scheduled arrival – just in case the flight was delayed. (It was.) We booked the Uffizi Gallery first thing on Thursday morning, and the Bargello first thing Friday morning.

That gave us at least three afternoons to wander around Florence serendipitously. On the weekend we planned to drive around the Tuscan countryside. The Monday and Tuesday before we left were free, so we’d have time to visit any high-priority items we’d missed.

Packing

• Rain & cold. In January, we were told to expect lots of rain and temps in the 40s-50s F. The landscape looked as in the photo above, not the brilliant colors in most tourist brochures. As it turned out, we had drizzle, but not much pouring rain. Although we packed 2 umbrellas and carried them one or two days, a hat or hood was usually enough to keep the rain off. On one and only one day, it was chilly enough to wear gloves in the morning.
• Clothes. Given how much walking and climbing we did, it turned out to be very important to have layers that we could peel off. I was comfortable with a long-sleeve shirt plus light-weight down jacket plus rain- and wind-resistant shell. I wore yoga pants or light-weight, quick-drying cargo pants; my husband wore jeans. We both packed dressier clothes and shoes, but it turned out there was nowhere we felt the need to dress up. The Michelin-rated restaurant in Florence, Enoteca Pinchiorri, looked like it would have required or deserved dressier clothes, but it didn’t open until 7. Even if we had wanted to eat that late, they were probably booked far in advance during the holiday week.
• Shoes. We packed very comfortable shoes with soles that wouldn’t slip on 500-year-old pavements and stairs. I figured if the soles don’t slip on polished concrete, the grip is probably OK.
• Food. You’re allowed to bring sealed containers of food on planes. I should have brought some no-sugar-added peanut butter, jelly, and low-carb flatbreads. It turns out there’s far less over-processed food in Italy than in the US, but there’s also no low-carb snacks other than nuts. We always travel with a handful of Atkins bars, to get us through plane rides and long drives when we don’t want to stop for a proper meal.
• Tote bag. A thin, foldable nylon tote is very useful for carrying extra layers, souvenirs, groceries, etc. I bought one at a duty-free shop (19 x 16″ without handles).

Electronics & camera

• Converter for European current. We have 2 Foval converter / adapters (Amazon). Because we took 2 laptops, 2 phones, a Kindle reader and a camera, we also packed a surge protector strip with 5 outlets to plug into one of the converters.
• Camera. My Sony SLR (Cyber-Shot DSC-RX100M3) is 7+ years old, but its large lens means it takes better pictures than my cell phone does. I don’t take photos of artworks with my cell phone unless the SONY’s batteries run out. Your mileage on this will vary.
• Photo back-ups. At the end of the day on any trip, I routinely download photos from the Sony camera to my laptop, then clear the SD card for the next day’s photos. This time my laptop’s hard drive crashed, irreparably, on the third day of the trip. Normally the laptop would back up to Google Drive overnight, but the laptop seemed to be overheating when plugged into the converter, so I shut it down every night … hence no back-up to the cloud. I lost 3 days’ worth of photos. Infuriating. Next time, I’ll buy enough SD cards so that I don’t have to clear the cards every night. Even if you use a cell phone rather than an SLR, it’s worth remembering to check that your phone’s settings will allow it to back up when you’re away from home, even if it means paying for extra data.

Flights

• We flew from Tampa International to Frankfurt to Florence.
• TSA Pre-Check. Great within the US, but doesn’t apply in foreign airports. Allow enough layover time to wait on long security lines and immigration lines.
• Upgrading. If you have $800-1,000 to spare, a transatlantic flight is a great time to upgrade. More space, food on demand, and footrests to keep the blood from pooling in your feet.

Frankfurt Airport (FRA)

• Confusing layout. I hate FRA more than any airport I’ve ever been in. It’s sprawling, complex, and has multiple levels. I’m good at keeping my bearings, and I’d looked at a map of FRA before getting off the plane – but I found it impossible to figure out where I was, or how long it would take to get where I needed to be.
• Long lines. Arriving from the US, you have to pass through European Union immigration (a long line) and security (another long line). Our plane arrived 2 hours late. Although we still had an hour to spare, we could not make our connection to Florence. If you’re running late and/or it’s a busy time of day, it’s worth hustling to get on the immigration and security lines ahead of the other passengers on your plane.
• Fast Lanes. I read later that if your flight’s listed on the departure board at FRA, you can go to “Fast Lanes” at the security checkpoint. I didn’t see any signs for Fast Lanes while we were actually at FRA.
• Food at FRA. We passed very few sit-down restaurants in the terminal. If you want a sit-down meal and you’re absolutely sure you have enough time to make your connection (by which I mean, you’ve got at least 3 hours), stop as soon as you see a sit-down restaurant. Once we passed the final security checkpoint, there were only cafes with sandwiches and lukewarm pizza. There was no shopping beyond the final checkpoint, either, except a duty-free shop.
• Jetways: few and far between. Mostly passengers are taken to and from the plane by shuttle bus, which adds 15-30 minutes to the time needed to make a connection. Once the bus has pulled away from the gate, there’s no way to reach the plane. A major new terminal is under construction at FRA, which might help … but I don’t know when it’s slated to open.

Florence Airport (FLR)

• Florence Airport has one runway, which is sometimes closed due to crosswinds. Pisa (an hour away) has more runways, so you might want to check flights there as well.
• Florence Airport’s terminal is so small that its website doesn’t even have a map!
• Restaurants. Florence has a relatively small airport, with few (maybe only one) sit-down restaurants.
• ATM. There’s one near the FLR terminal exit where you can get euros.
• Shopping. On our return trip we walked through a really nice shopping area in the Florence airport, but arriving we didn’t see that area at all.

Next week: car rental and driving in Italy.

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