8 Day Rome, Florence, Pisa, Siena, Venice Tour with Food & Wine

A driver meets you at Fiumicino or Ciampino and brings you into central Rome. The rest of the day is yours. Most people drop their bags and walk straight out to the Pantheon or the Trevi Fountain, eat early, and sleep off the flight.

You will receive confirmation of the following morning’s start time and meeting point at your hotel.

1 ora•Ingresso gratuito

Five centuries of papal collecting, entered ahead of the queue with a licensed guide. The route works through the Pinecone Courtyard, the Gallery of Maps with its painted survey of the whole peninsula, and the tapestry rooms woven to Raphael’s designs, before the corridors narrow towards the chapel.

2 ore•Ingresso incluso

Michelangelo spent four years on his back painting the ceiling, and came back twenty-five years later to cover the altar wall with the Last Judgment. Your guide explains the scheme before you go in, because inside the chapel is kept silent and photography is not permitted.

30 minuti•Ingresso incluso

Bernini reached his colonnade out from the basilica in two curved arms — his own image was of the Church embracing the world. Stand on either of the two porphyry discs set into the paving and all four rows of columns line up as a single row.

20 minuti•Ingresso gratuito

Entry to the basilica costs nothing, and travellers who want to go in can do so independently after the tour ends. Michelangelo’s Pietà stands just inside on the right, behind glass since it was attacked in 1972. Expect a security queue, and note that shoulders and knees must be covered. No guide accompanies this visit.

45 minuti•Ingresso gratuito

Across the Tiber

Across the Tiber lies the quarter that has stayed most stubbornly itself — cobbled lanes, ivy on ochre walls, washing strung between the windows. A four-hour walk moves through family-run counters and a wine stop, tasting as you go. The food and wine are included and stand in for dinner.

4 ore•Ingresso gratuito

Michelangelo laid out this square in the 1530s, turning the city’s ceremonial face away from the ruins and towards St. Peter’s. Behind the Palazzo Senatorio a terrace opens onto the whole sweep of the ancient centre — the best free view in Rome, and the point where the ancient city finally makes sense as one place.

20 minuti•Ingresso gratuito

Imperial Forums (Via dei Fori Imperiali) - Four emperors built here in turn — Caesar, Augustus, Nerva and Trajan — each trying to outbuild the last across a century and a half. You walk the length of Via dei Fori Imperiali with the excavations open on both sides. This is a street-level viewing stop

entry to the archaeological area is not included.

Si passa senza fermarsi

Trajan’s Column - Two hundred metres of carved relief wound around a single shaft, recording the Dacian wars scene by scene. The emperor’s ashes were kept in a chamber at the base. It has stood on this spot since AD 113, and the figure on top has been St. Peter since the sixteenth century.

10 minuti•Ingresso gratuito

Trajan’s Markets — A tiered brick complex cut into the hillside, built as offices and halls for the business of the forums below. It now houses the Museum of the Imperial Forums, and it is the one place in this quarter where you walk the ancient streets at their own level rather than look down on them from a railing.

1 ora•Ingresso incluso

The largest amphitheatre ever built, seen from street level where its arcades rise above the road. Your guide explains how the arena worked, how it was flooded, and why two thirds of the outer wall is missing. This is an exterior photo stop — interior entry is not included in this tour and cannot be added.

Si passa senza fermarsi

Raised in AD 315 for a victory won in a civil war, and assembled largely from sculpture stripped off earlier monuments — an emperor borrowing the faces of better ones. It stands on the road the triumphal processions took, between the amphitheatre and the Palatine.

10 minuti•Ingresso gratuito

A long green hollow that once held a quarter of a million people watching chariot races — almost nothing is left standing, which is the point, because what you see is the shape of the track itself, still pressed into the ground between the Palatine and the Aventine

Si passa senza fermarsi

Rome–Florence high-speed train

1 h 35 min•Ingresso incluso

Your Florence walk begins under the arcades here, on ground that held the Roman forum and later the city’s market and Jewish quarter before the square was cleared in the nineteenth century. The old cafés on the north side still trade.

15 minuti•Ingresso gratuito

The sixteenth-century silk and gold market, still trading in leather and straw. Under the arches sits the Porcellino, a bronze boar whose snout is worn bright by everyone who rubs it for luck — the tradition is to place a coin in its mouth and let it fall.

10 minuti•Ingresso gratuito

The only bridge in Florence to survive the Second World War, and still carrying the jewellers’ shops that Ferdinando I installed in 1593 after clearing out the butchers, whose smell reached the corridor his family used to cross above.

20 minuti•Ingresso gratuito

An open-air sculpture hall in front of the Palazzo Vecchio. Under the Loggia dei Lanzi stand Cellini’s bronze Perseus and Giambologna’s Rape of the Sabine Women, carved from a single block. A copy of the David holds the spot the original occupied for three and a half centuries.

25 minuti•Ingresso gratuito

Green, white and pink marble wrapped around a Gothic cathedral, with Brunelleschi’s dome above it — the largest masonry dome ever raised, built without scaffolding from below by a goldsmith who had never constructed one. Your guide reads the exterior; entry to the cathedral, the dome climb and the bell tower are not included.

The oldest building in the square, where Dante was christened. The east doors are the ones Michelangelo is said to have called the Gates of Paradise — what you see on the building are copies, the originals having been moved indoors for conservation. Interior entry is not included.

Si passa senza fermarsi

Your guide brings you through the reserved entrance and hands over at the door. With an audio guide and nobody hurrying you, the Botticelli rooms, Leonardo’s Annunciation and Michelangelo’s Doni Tondo take as long as you want to give them

the corridor windows frame the Arno and Ponte Vecchio from above. The visit inside is self-guided — no guide accompanies you.

2 ore•Ingresso incluso

A sloping brick shell of a square, fanned into nine segments for the nine merchants who governed the medieval city. Twice each summer it is packed with earth and ten horses race around it bareback. A local guide walks you through the square and the surrounding streets.

1 ora•Ingresso gratuito

Bands of black and white marble climbing the whole facade, with the unfinished wall of an abandoned extension beside it — Siena meant to build the largest cathedral in Christendom until the plague of 1348 stopped the work. Viewed from the square

interior entry is not included.

Si passa senza fermarsi

A family-owned estate between Siena and San Gimignano, in country of vine rows and cypress. Lunch is Tuscan antipasti, a pasta course and dessert, poured with the estate’s own reds and eaten looking out over the vineyards. Lunch and the tasting are included.

2 ore•Ingresso gratuito

Fourteen medieval towers still standing out of the seventy-two the town once had, built by rival families competing on height. Free time to wander the cobbled lanes, the artisan shops and the walls, with the Val d’Elsa opening out below.

1 h 30 min•Ingresso gratuito

The tower began to tilt before the third storey was finished, on soft ground the builders had not tested. Free time in the Field of Miracles to photograph it alongside the Cathedral and the round Baptistery, white against the grass. The square is open and free to walk

climbing the tower is not included.

1 h 15 min•Ingresso non incluso

Michelangelo’s unfinished Prisoners line the approach — figures half out of the marble, left where the work stopped — and then the hall opens onto the David. He began it at twenty-six, from a block two sculptors before him had abandoned as ruined. Timed entry is booked for the first slot of the morning, the quietest hour of the day.

1 ora•Ingresso incluso

Florence–Venice high-speed train

2 h 5 min•Ingresso gratuito

Venice water transfer

30 minuti•Ingresso gratuito

The only piazza in Venice — every other open space is a campo. Napoleon is supposed to have called it the drawing room of Europe. The campanile has stood, fallen and been rebuilt

the clock tower has told the hour since 1499.

20 minuti•Ingresso gratuito

A Byzantine church in a Latin city, built to hold a saint’s body Venetian merchants took out of Alexandria under a cargo of pork so the guards would not search it. Your guide reads the gold mosaic vaults above — eight thousand square metres of them, laid over seven centuries.

45 minuti•Ingresso incluso

Government, court and prison in one building. You walk the council chambers, stand under Tintoretto’s Paradise filling an entire wall, and cross the Bridge of Sighs — named for the last view of the lagoon the condemned got through its stone lattice.

1 h 15 min•Ingresso incluso

A private gondola, yours alone rather than shared with other travellers, taking you off the Grand Canal into the narrow rii behind it. Water gates, back doors and washing lines pass at arm’s length, and the only sounds are the oar and the boatman calling the blind corners.

30 minuti•Ingresso incluso

The commercial heart of the city for a thousand years, and still where Venetians eat standing up. An evening working through the bacari — the small wine bars where cicchetti are taken straight off the counter with a glass of wine. The tastings are included and stand in for dinner.

3 ore•Ingresso gratuito

One of only four bridges across the Grand Canal, built in wood as a temporary measure in 1933 and never replaced, because the city grew fond of it. The view downstream to the Salute is the one every painter of Venice has tried.

15 minuti•Ingresso gratuito

Santa Maria della Salute (church)

15 minuti•Ingresso gratuito

A white octagon raised in thanks after the plague of 1630 took a third of the city, standing on more than a hundred thousand timber piles driven into the mud. Beyond the marble floor, the sacristy holds three early Titian ceiling canvases and Tintoretto’s Marriage at Cana, painted so the light in the picture falls exactly as it falls through the room’s own windows. Sacristy admission is included.

30 minuti•Ingresso incluso

A long sunlit promenade facing the Giudecca, named for the timber rafts that once floated down from the mountains and were unloaded here. It is where Venetians walk on summer evenings, and where the city keeps its best ice cream.

20 minuti•Ingresso gratuito

One of the last yards still building and repairing gondolas by hand. Its wooden buildings look more alpine than Venetian because the boatwrights came down from the Dolomites and built what they knew. The yard is a working premises, closed to visitors and seen from the campo across the canal.

Si passa senza fermarsi

A quiet square with a vegetable barge moored permanently at the canal side, trading as it has for generations. The church front is plain to the point of severity, which is why film crews keep using it.

15 minuti•Ingresso gratuito

Wide, irregular and entirely unpolished — the least ornamental square in Venice and the most lived-in. Students from Ca’ Foscari share the outdoor tables with people who have been here all their lives, and washing hangs above the whole thing.

20 minuti•Ingresso gratuito

A confraternity house whose upper hall carries nine canvases Giambattista Tiepolo painted into the ceiling in the 1740s — still in the room they were made for, lit as he intended. Few visitors find it, which is rather the point of ending here.

45 minuti•Ingresso incluso

Venice–Rome high-speed train

3 h 45 min•Ingresso gratuito

Breakfast and Rome airport departure transfer

1 ora•Ingresso gratuito