Rick Steves
Best of South Italy
2024
A scrapbook celebrating
the trip of a lifetime
View from our hotel room in Vieste
Hello! We are Kathleen and Bill. We are computer professionals living in southern Vermont with our two dogs and two cats and we are excited to share our adventures in the south of Italy with you!
We have done a fair amount of independent travel, but had never taken a tour before last year. Most of our travel has been to places where we speak enough of the language (English, French) to get by. But we were nervous about going to places where we have no grasp on the language at all. So we decided to trust Rick Steves and book the Best of South Italy tour for our first trip to Italy. Best decision ever!
The most important travel lessons this experience has taught us are:
-
There are language learning apps out there that make learning fun and give you exposure to the language of the country you are visiting.
-
We could have gotten by on our own.
-
We are very glad that didn’t do it on our own. We discovered that having experts plan itineraries leads to experiences we could never have created if left to our own devices.
-
Traveling as part of a tour is all the fun with none of the logistics that can add stress to travel.
-
We want to take more Rick Steves tours!
.jpeg)
I had two items at the top of my bucket list: Pompeii and Matera. A 1980's family trip that included Ephesus left me feeling drawn to the ancient world. It is fascinating to imagine the lives that were lived in a world very different from our own.
I had always assumed that we would be on our own to find our way to Matera, so imagine my surprise when I discovered that it was one of the destinations on the Best of South Italy tour!
​
Rick has crafted an itinerary that ensured we saw the famous sites, but also the places we never knew we wanted to go, but which ended up becoming highlights of the entire trip!
Itinerary
This is a fairly active trip. There are plenty of hills and steps to climb. That said, I am not an athletic person in the least, so I think anyone in any sort of reasonable shape can handle them.
​
We stayed in a variety of hotels, each wonderful and chosen to provide a unique experience. There were no cookie-cutter chains on this trip!
​
The itinerary is really optimized to allow you to see a lot of things without being stuck on the (admittedly comfortable) bus for many hours at a time. I don't think we went longer than two hours without a stop for a tour or at least a rest area.​
Anticipation
We believe that the trip itself is only one part of the journey.
We booked the tour about a year in advance which gave us time to research things we might want to see and learn about what to expect from folks who had been on Ricks Steves tours.
In addition to the obvious resources of Rick Steves books and TV shows, Rick offers forums on his website that are great for getting travel tips and hearing about other people’s experiences. The forums proved invaluable for answering all our questions about what to expect, what to pack and the things we might do on our own during the ample free time provided on the tour.
The most consistent fact about the people participating in the forums is that they are so enthusiastic about the tours, even after having done them many times. There are people who are into double digits in the number tours, and they continue to rave about them. That let us know, before we even booked, that this trip was going to be unforgettable.
Life Pro Tips
Practice packing before you go. We have a one week trip that we take every year and I always bring a huge, overfilled suitcase. Since it is a trip I know well, I decided to only bring the carry-on. Lo and behold, I realized I'd never needed that huge suitcase to begin with. That made packing for Italy far less stressful.
I asked about clothes people liked that packed small and washed easily and learned about Merino wool. It doesn't itch, it regulates temp (helps you stay cool when its hot, warm when its cold), and dries quickly when you wash it at the hotel.
The higher the percentage of cotton in jeans, the longer they will take to dry. Try to find lightweight pants that are blends.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has it right: Don't forget your towel! Or, in this case, washcloth. Many hotels don't provide them, so if you want one you should bring it with you.
We got Global Entry cards before the trip. We found the process to be pretty easy and it made going through Customs a breeze.
A hanging, expandable packing cube made life much easier. I packed all my clothes in this and then just had to unzip and hang it in the closet to be unpacked at each new hotel.
Laundry detergent sheets (like fabric softener sheets) pack small so you can wash clothes at the hotel.
I researched the places where we had days to ourselves so that I'd know what to see when we got there. Our guide was great for helping folks figure out fun things to do, but knowing all the options in advance made a difference for us.
I had been unfamiliar with esims for phones and they are great! You buy a package online for calls/texts and scan a QR code to add it to your phone. Then when you get to your destination you just toggle it on in your phone's settings and you're good to go.
We brought a clothes line, but never used it. We used plastic foldable hangers that took up very little space in the suitcase. Even in bathrooms with showers in enclosures rather than with shower curtains we were always able to find places to hang them.
Tickets for the Colosseum go on sale 720 hours (30 days) in advance of the timed admission. The underground tickets sell out within seconds, so you have to be online and refreshing the page before the time you hope to go. Also, lots of tour operators sell underground tours, but they don't always manage to get tickets. There were disappointed folks online who had the underground removed from their tour at the last minute.