Italy sells out early. Book the tickets first.
Which Colosseum ticket gets you onto the arena floor. What a gondola costs once you are in it. Whether the Uffizi needs a guide or only a timed slot. Reviews of every tour you can book in Italy.
The Vatican, the Colosseum, the Doge’s Palace, the Uffizi.
Four timed tickets that decide the shape of a first Italian trip. What each one costs, and what the people who queued for it say.
01The Vatican morningVatican: Museums & Sistine Chapel Entrance TicketRoom after room of galleries ending under the Sistine ceiling. The first slot of the day is the only quiet one.
02Ancient RomeColosseum, Roman Forum & Palatine Guided TourOne ticket covers the Colosseum, the Forum and the Palatine. A guide is the difference between rubble and a city.
03Venice indoorsDoge’s Palace Reserved Entry TicketReserved entry to the Doge’s Palace, the prisons, and the covered bridge between them.
04Florence in one slotSkip-The-Line Uffizi Gallery Timed Entry TicketBotticelli, Leonardo and the collection the Medici paid for. Turn up in July without a booking and you will not get in.
Guided, skip-the-line, or just a timed slot. Decide before you land.
Italy’s great sites run on capped entry windows, and the good hours go weeks ahead. Three doors to get through, what each costs, and where the guide earns the difference.
Rome, Florence, Venice, Naples, Milan, and the cliff road below Sorrento.
The ancient capital, the Renaissance one, a city built on water, the bay that buried Pompeii, a Gothic roof you can walk on, and the coast that everyone drives once. Six places to start, and the best day out in each.
The tours that fill Rome, Florence and Venice first.
Every Italian tour we have reviewed →More travellers take these than anything else in the country. What each one costs, and what earns it the slot.
1
Vatican Museums & Sistine Chapel Tour with Optional Basilica
Tour the Vatican Museums and Sistine Chapel with fast-track entry, an expert guide, and optional St. Peter’s Basilica access.
From · $79
Read our review →
2
Cathedral and Duomo’s Terraces Entrance Ticket
from $30
3
Vatican Museums, Sistine Chapel & St Peter’s Basilica Guided Tour
from $22
4
Colosseum, Palatine Hill and Roman Forum Guided Tour
from $52
5
Guided Tour of Colosseum, Roman Forum & Palatine Hill
from $55
6
Colosseum & Forum with Audio Guide App -Optional Arena
from $41
7
Colosseum, Roman Forum and Palatine Hill Guided Tour
from $59
8
Naples Underground Entry Ticket and Guided Tour
from $21
The Forum is a field until somebody tells you what stood in it.
The arena floor, the tunnels underneath it where the cages waited, and the Palatine gardens the emperors built on top. Three ways into the same ruin, and what a guide adds to each.
Venice belongs to whoever is still there at seven.
The palace, the basilica and the Grand Canal all run on timed entry, so the queue is a choice. Burano and Murano are a half day out across the lagoon, and they are the part of Venice a day trip never reaches.
Every Venice day out →
In Italy the lesson usually ends as lunch.
Pasta rolled by hand in a Roman kitchen, a Chianti cellar on the road between Florence and Siena, the fried-food lanes of the Spanish Quarter in Naples. Book the class before the heat and the tasting after it.
From a six-dollar Pantheon slot to a private day in Tuscany.
Every tour on the site, grouped by what it costs. A good number of the best Italian days come in under the price of dinner in Rome.
Timed entries, audio-guide tickets, market walks and the short boat hops out of Sorrento and Venice.
The full-day standards: Pompeii with an archaeologist, Tuscany by minibus, the Amalfi road end to end.
Private guides, the Colosseum underground, a chartered hull off Capri, and the once-a-trip splurges.
A buried town, a boat built crooked, and the David.
Cathedrals and old quarters run the length of Europe. A Roman town stopped at breakfast, a hull made lopsided so one oar can steer it, and a seventeen-foot marble teenager do not.
Pompeii and Vesuvius
Vesuvius buried the town in ash in AD 79, and the ash kept it. Streets, shopfronts, bread ovens and the ruts cart wheels cut into the paving are all still there, along with plaster casts poured into the voids the bodies left behind. A large share of what is excavated is roped off at any given time, so a guide who knows which houses are open this week is worth more here than almost anywhere in Italy.
- 1Entry Ticket and Guided Tour with an Archaeologist★★★★★★★★★★ 4.8 · 19,459 reviews
- 2Entry Ticket with Optional Audio Guide★★★★★★★★★★ 4.2 · 12,360 reviews
- 3Small Group Tour with an Archaeologist★★★★★★★★★★ 4.8 · 12,264 reviews
How a gondola holds a line
A gondola is deliberately asymmetric. The left side is longer than the right, which cancels the sideways push of a single oar and lets one rower hold a straight line down a canal barely wider than the boat. The city sets the fare and the length of the ride rather than the boatman, so the real variables are where you step in, which canals you get, and whether anybody sings.
- 1Grand Canal Gondola Ride with App Commentary★★★★★★★★★★ 4.1 · 18,908 reviews
- 2Boat Trip: Glimpse of Murano, Torcello & Burano Islands★★★★★★★★★★ 4.3 · 15,699 reviews
- 3Grand Canal by Gondola with Live Commentary★★★★★★★★★★ 4.1 · 13,681 reviews
The David and the Uffizi
Michelangelo was twenty-six and working a block of marble two other sculptors had already abandoned. The David now stands at the end of a corridor of unfinished figures in the Accademia, which is the whole argument for going in rather than photographing the copy outside the Palazzo Vecchio. The Uffizi, ten minutes away, holds the Botticellis the same city paid for.
- 1Skip-The-Line Uffizi Gallery Timed Entry Ticket★★★★★★★★★★ 4.5 · 27,832 reviews
- 2Timed Entrance Ticket to Michelangelo’s David★★★★★★★★★★ 4.6 · 16,983 reviews
- 3Michelangelo’s David Skip-the-Line Entry Ticket★★★★★★★★★★ 4.5 · 12,764 reviews
Four Italian bookings that will not wait.
Most of a trip here can be arranged over breakfast. These four run on capped entry windows and calendars that take no interest in when your flight lands.
- 01Da Vinci’s Last Supper Guided TourFifteen minutes in the room, a few dozen people at a time, and slots released in blocks months ahead. There is no walk-up queue for it.
- 02Vatican: Museums & Sistine Chapel Entrance TicketTimed entry all year, and the Museums close on Sundays apart from the last one of the month, which is free and packed.
- 03Colosseum, Roman Forum & Palatine Guided TourThe arena floor and the underground are separate capped add-ons to the standard ticket, and they are the first things to go.
- 04Skip-The-Line Uffizi Gallery Timed Entry TicketReserved entry costs a few euros and buys back a morning. In high summer the walk-up line is the whole afternoon.
Half of Italy’s art is shut on Monday. Build the week around it.
The Uffizi, the Accademia and Milan’s Brera all take Monday off, and the Vatican Museums close on Sunday instead. Monday is the day to be in a kitchen, on the water, or walking a market, and to keep the galleries for Tuesday.
By place: cities, coast and islands
By kind of day: gallery, ruin, kitchen or boat
Rome to Venice the long way, with the stops most itineraries skip.
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