Many people travel to Italy, and are attractted to the relaxed and beautiful lifestyle. Luckily, Italy offers a wide range of hotel and youth hostel accommodation's airports, camping grounds, tourist guides and tours , and excellent traveling transportation by train, or plane. The most important aspect of traveling is budgeting your rip, and cutting corners and costs when necessary. The best way to do this is to plan ahead, and write your a budget plan of where you want to travel in Italy and what you wish to spend.
The Internet can be an excellent source of information in which you can easily gather traveling information, and to book your flights and night accommodation's ahead of time to save money. Googling your search can be helpful.
Looking for a cheap place to stay in Italys major cities...Roma, Firenze, and Napoli. Why not stay at a hostel? A hostel is an excellent alteranative stay to an expensive hotel. You must remember to bring your own towels, and personal items, because at such a low cost, personal comforts arent as easily available to you.
If a hostel helps boost your budget, than I sugesst you check out this following website (hostels.com) where you can find a hostel in mostly every major city, in Europe. You can book a hostel for one person, to a group of ten and more now online.
Although hotels are more expensive than a hostel, they offer more for someone who is not familiar navigating themeselves alone in Italy. Most major hotels can arrange and provide multilingual guides for one on one guides. Walking tours is an excellent way of becoming more oriented with your surrounding area.
But companies offer well organized bus tours of the countryside, including excursions. Travelers planning to take their vehicle into Italy need to be able to produce an international motor insurance certificate and vehicle registration document. The use of seatbelts is non negotiable. , fines for non compliant motorist and passengers are extremely high. In addition motorcycle rider must wear helmets while driving on the road. Parking in the street is generally reserved for residents and businesses.
But don't worry cities have available parking garages for any motor vehicle.
For travelers with disabilitites, many of the more populated attraction and areas have been modified and equipped with ramps for wheelchair access, contact a familiarized tourist information office for about accessible hotels galleries and museums, and for address of Italian associations for travelers with a mobile impairment.
The most important aspect traveling is finding a public restroom when you need one. Like mother said, use the restroom before you leave home, but you can find public toilettes in all public areas in airports, railway, bus stations, museums and art galleries, they are often designated by the sign 'WC.' But be prepaired to pay a small fee for using the public toilette facilties.
If there isn't a set charge amount, it is polite to leave a small tip of small change of gratitude behind.
My favorite trip in Italy was my weekend trip to Lake Como, now famous for its local celebrity resident, American film artisit, George Clooney. The fabulous pristine look of lake como was breathtaking, but the price was a bellyache. I must admit I realized after that there were times I could have cut corners, and saved money easier if I did my homework ahead of time, about accomadations, travel time, cost of train fair, food, and etc.
Be smart. First you have to watch for the tourist season. If you travel in Italy in Janurary through Feburary and in early March, you can probably barter with the Hotel desk clerk about the cost of a night stay. I have tried this, and once in Sienna last March, and payed 80 euro for a suite room that was twice the value in which payed, because it had a view of the Doumo, with a covered outside balcony, breakfast included. How did I do this? There wasn’t enough tourist, and the hotel was almost vacant at the time, I asked for a price, and asked the hotel clerk if he could lower the price, and he did.
Second, you cant be afraid or timid to ask for a discount, or lower price. Most stores, and shops that are independantly runned, are more than willing to lower their cost for a potential customer if they realize you are interested, but don’t have the budget to splurge. Remember they want to make a sell, and are willing to lower their cost, and profit, to make that extra sale. Keep in mind, that you are the one who is spending money, and you are in command. Thirdly, from that note, don’t allow anyone in talk you into buying merchandise that you arent interested in.
Merchants are counting on timid tourists to give in. Fourthly, if you travel by train, and you are not in a hurry, don’t take the Eurostar. Instead travel by the intercity train, or a late night train that will arrive to your destination by morning. Taking a midnight train, you wont have to worry about night accomadations, and you are still saving time, and will arrive early in the morning to have breakfast with the locals. Or the orange ATAF buses(www.aftaf.net) provide a cheap and efficient way of getting around the cities and suburbs.
Before you board the bus, but your ticket from shops and newsstands display an orange "bigletti annonamenti ATAF qui
