October trip to Piemonte then to Florence

New to the forum and was looking for some recommendations for our upcoming trip to Italy.

We will arrive in Torino. We would like to stay in a smaller town in the Piemonte region. Small hotels or B&B type places are our preference. A town with some good restaurants is a must. After several days there, we would like to spend some time near Florence. We will have a car.

Recommendations for Lodging, Restaurants and of course wineries would be appreciated. I have been searching through old forum posts and have found a lot of great info. If anyone can add something, that would be great.

Thanks

Hi Justin
Plenty of options, but if heading down to Florence afterwards, then the obvious suggestion of the Langhe region also feels the best one (though for a more under the radar option with whites the equal of the reds, Tortona is worth a thought).

www.langheroero.it tourist site is a wonderful resource and this is a rather professional / committed tourist office. It has extensive accomodation listings, winery listings etc. etc. If you like B&B, do try www.agriturismo.it for farmstays, often very nice indeed, with plenty of wineries running these. That not only gives you an easy tasting to organise, but they’ll have plenty of contacts for other wineries if you’d like them to help book visits (booking is almost always essential in the region).

If the Langhe does appeal, Alba gives you the obvious small town, though many prefer to stay in the wine villages themselves:
Barbaresco: Barbaresco, Neive, Treiso (the latter with a fine selection of restaurants that could happily cover 4 evenings without venturing further)
Barolo: Barolo, La Morra, Serralunga d’Alba, Castiglione Falletto, Monforte d’Alba, plus other smaller villages like Novello and Verduno

Plenty of other good places around (we had a great one in Santa Vittora d’Alba for instance), but having wineries in walking distancs can be brilliant if you make the logistics work for a relaxing holiday.

If flying into Torino, the hire car offices are diagonally to the right as you emerge into the arrivals hall after the customs channels. The cars are parked in the multi-storey across the road, and it’s worth checking the exit route from the airport via google earth to make for a very calm start to the driving experience (it’s a relatively easy double back on yourself to the left at the 1st junction. Expect reasonably heavy traffic on the tangenziale until you pass level with Torino, and from then on it steadily becomes easier. From there fairly straightforward until a somewhat odd junction near Alba (so that’s another worth looking at on Google streetview beforehand). Driving around the wine villages is pretty easy / enjoyable and parking remains easy for now. For Florence, very much plan a route and ensure you don’t hit the ZTL (traffic restricted zone) as the fines are steep. Likewise Alba now has a ZTL with fines for entering this zone.

The Egyptian Museum in Torino is excellent and worth the visit if you have an interest.

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If you do have time planned in Torino, rather than it being simply an airport or train station entry point, then do let us know. Many of us have been there, and personally having had >10 visits now, my love of the city is pretty obvious.

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If driving from Torino, make sure you have small bills and an adequate amount of change for the tolls. It cost us about 10€ in total to get to the Barolo area, and about 3€ to get back. The toll booth machines take cards but I’ve heard American CCs are unreliable in them, so best to be prepared.

Also, don’t speed. They have cameras that average your speed across significant distances and then automatically issue tickets.

A very good point about the change. For us, often having a holiday in Italy (or elsewhere in the euro-zone) every year, we’ll always come back with a selection of small change. Unlike holidays pre-Euro or elsewhere, we don’t bother to get rid of change on the last day / at the airport. It becomes very useful on landing, for buses etc. and we now never order currency in advance either. Thus we’ll have often have €5, €10, €20 and €50 notes plus €20-€30 in coins. Enough to handle travel to our first base location and often the evening meal. At some point on the 2nd or 3rd day we’ll use a bancomat.

How to handle this if ordering currency in advance and having none from previous visits?

  1. Definitely ask your currency supllier to give a range of notes. Not just €50. Specifically ask for a few €5 notes and some €10s and €20s. €50s are ok, but Italian shops etc. don’t tend to keep as much of a float as (say) shops in the UK.

  2. If you do arrive with just €50 notes, then head to the little kiosk (IIRC) opposite (and slightly to the left of) the arrivals door and buy something small like gola sport (mint) or pocket caffe sweets for the journey, getting some useful change and/or head into the bar to grab a caffè.

  3. I’m not sure if there is a change machine on the right hand side of the arrivals hall. There are bus ticket machines, but I don’t know if there is a change machine as well / built-in

Justin- I’m a Marriott Rewards member and have a lot of points. We used them at the Westin in Florence. Beautiful hotel right on the river Arno. Great location and service.

I posted a bunch about our trip and restaurants. Enoteca Pitti a board favorite is a must. Are you going south into Tuscany at all ?

I never carry change; my debit cards always work. And have never had an issue getting cash on arrival in Europe (once in India) at an ATM except one day (not on arrival) when there was an outage at all ATMs. Well over 50 international trips.

That being said, I usually have some Euros or foreign currency from prior trip. But I never pay the usurious forex charges involved in getting foreign currency in the US