Hello all!
My wife and I are going to Italy in about 3 weeks (Venice for 2 days, then Florence for 4), and I was wondering if someone could help answer a few, maybe slightly more general questions.
First, on trip advisor, there are tons of “skip the line tour” options for places like Doge’s Balance, San Marco, Duomo, Uffuzi, etc. Is it ONLY possible to skip the big lines if in a tour group? Or does buying tickets ahead of time allow one to skip the line as well?
Several places have their own “Skip the Line options” which generally ARE a good idea. San Marco, Uffuzi, Duomo, Doge’s all provide them via their website. While these are worthwhile typically, keep in mind there will STILL be a “skip the line” entrance line. It will move faster though and has priority at the entrance. The best idea we found is to get the skip the line ticket via the website, and go at an off hour. For example, we went to Doge’s at 3pm and it was perfect because it was starting to calm down.
Also, how readily marked are important facts for those same kind of places? e.g., if we want to get a moderate amount of history of Doge’s, do we have to have a tour guide for that? Or is there a audio guide available at most of these places?
This mostly depends how much history and background you want, and how much of your time you want to stand around reading the signs. Most of them are well marked with background and history, but not many of those fun side note stories that tour guides are good for. The art museums all have audio guides which are great.
Also, how closed down do these cities get on Sundays? I live in the South and we become a ghost town on Sunday, and I can only imagine we are less traditional than Italian cities.
Its Italy. Things are closed kind of whenever they want to be. As our Airbnb host said when we got into Venice: “its monday, so they are closed today. Because… well Monday seemed like a good day to be closed!” In general Mondays and Tuesdays seemed to have slightly less open than other days of the week though.
Final question: booking meals. I don’t know that we want to have every second of our days planned, but if we need to have reservations if we want to eat well, I’m happy to do it!
some of the places it was definitely needed, but only because they are SMALL! Testierie only has something like 15 seats in the whole place, as did most of our other favorite meals! Testierie books about 3 weeks out, but all the others we were able to walk in that afternoon or the day before and reserve the night we wanted. Mostly its just so you have a table blocked from all the other tourists who just wander by it looking at menu boards.
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