Northern Italy

Italy | Jul 24 - Aug 1, 2022

Our first excursion was to ride the train into the alps. We loved it. It was so beautiful. Recommend highly. Great experience.
Our visit to Lake Como was great. Very beautiful lake. We rode around it on a ferry. Then went to a fabulous restaurant for lunch. We were celebrating our anniversary (50th) and my son and Daughter-in-law’s 20th anniversary. Our grandkids went swimming in the lake after lunch. Very nice day. Roberta did a great job.
We stayed in the Santa Rosa Grand Hotel in Milan. Very nice hotel.
Florence: I can’t remember the name of the hotel in Florence but it was nice. This hotel had the best breakfast.
Half our group went into the Tuscany wine region next. We visited several wineries and also went to the Italian/US WW2 memorial for US soldiers killed in this region. Very moving! Extremely well done. Thank you Claudio for taking us there.
The other half had a rather harrowing experience riding bikes on a bike tour in the old city. The guide was not good. She actually rode off and left them. The gelato making was a success though. Everyone loved that.
The Cinque Terra was kind of a disaster due to the fact that our driver spoke NO English and had never been to the area before. We were expecting an English speaking guide but that didn’t happen. Our driver just dumped us out and indicated we should meet him back there at 4. Because we had expected to have a guide we didn’t really look into the possibilities. We ended up riding the train to Monterosso where the kids went swimming and we did some shopping. The tour company offered to pick us up there to try to make up for the completely non-English speaking driver. Since the driver had never been there before, we had a hard time finding each other. Definite an experience.
We had great helpers with our train transfers. They all did a good job.
Venice: Nice Hotel, my son had a private terrace. Large private terrace. We went on a city tour through Basilica San Marco-and the Doge palace. Nice tour with Allyssa. She was very knowledgeable but a bit overly so. We were pretty exhausted and struggled a bit…maybe if it hadn’t been so hot! Our visit to the Academy was, of course, one of the highlights. We also did a food tour. The adults enjoyed it. The kids, not so much. The gondola ride was great. Everyone really enjoyed it.
Train transfer back to Milan was great and uneventful. Flew out the next day.