Half of Italy sells out by Thursday.
Which Colosseum ticket gets you onto the arena floor. What the Uffizi costs if you book it yourself. Whether the gondola is worth it at eight in the evening. Reviews of every tour and ticket you can book in Italy.
01
02The Colosseum, the Vatican, Pompeii. Three tickets, three different problems.
These three carry more travellers than anything else in the country, and each one fails in its own way if you turn up without a slot. What it costs to get in, and which version of the visit is worth paying for.
★★★★★★★★★★ 4.7 · Colosseum, Roman Forum & Palatine Guided Tour
Colosseum & ForumOne ticket covers all three sites. The arena floor costs extra.
Vatican & Sistine ChapelTimed entry, closed Sundays, and a queue that starts before breakfast.
Pompeii & HerculaneumVast, unshaded and unsignposted. This is the one to take a guide for.
All 180 ancient sites and galleries →
Six Italies, and the best day out in each.
An imperial capital, a Renaissance city you can cross on foot, a lagoon with no roads, a bay under a volcano, the money city in the north, and a cliff road above the Tyrrhenian.
South of Naples the good day is measured in boat hours.
Positano from the sea instead of the bus window, the Blue Grotto on the one hour the tide allows, Capri circled before the day trippers land. Further north the same is true of the lagoon and the lakes.
Rome: the ruins before the heat, the rest after dark.
Everything in Rome →
Ancient Rome closes in on itself by noon in July, so the classical half of the city belongs to the morning. The evening belongs to the streets: Trastevere, the market at Testaccio, and whatever is open near the Pantheon at midnight.
Plain entry, or the arena floor
The standard ticket covers the Colosseum, the Forum and the Palatine over twenty-four hours. Standing on the arena floor where the gladiators came up is a separate, limited ticket, and it goes weeks ahead.
Vatican Museums, done early
Four miles of gallery lead to one ceiling. Take the first slot of the day or a Friday evening opening, and pick a ticket that lets you walk straight through to St Peter’s at the end.
Testaccio, then Trastevere
Supplì in the market hall, a butcher who has been there four generations, and pasta cooked in the pan it is served from. Rome eats late, and the good tours start when the light goes.
The Italian days out that book up before everything else.
Every Italian tour we have reviewed →More travellers take these than anything else in the country, and each one earns the slot for a different reason.
1
Cathedral and Duomo’s Terraces Entrance Ticket
Use this 48-hour ticket to visit Milan’s cathedral, rooftop terraces, Duomo Museum, and Church of St. Gottardo in Corte. You can explore at your own pace, add an audio guide in 10 languages, and choose an elevator option when available. Expect security checks, stairs, dress rules, and possible queues even with a timed entry.
From · $30
Read our review →
2
Doge’s Palace Reserved Entry Ticket
from $41
3
Guided Tour of Colosseum, Roman Forum & Palatine Hill
from $55
4
Colosseum & Forum with Audio Guide App -Optional Arena
from $41
5
Naples Underground Entry Ticket and Guided Tour
from $21
6
Tuscany Day Trip from Florence: Siena, San Gimignano, Pisa and Lunch at a Winery
from $114
7
Pantheon Fast-Track Ticket and Official Audio Guide
from $6
8
Entry Ticket and Guided Tour with an Archaeologist
from $35
What a day in Italy actually costs.
Every tour on the site, grouped by what you pay to get in. The famous ones are not always the expensive ones.
Museum entries, skip-the-line tickets, city walks and the short hops out of the ports.
The full-day standards: Pompeii with a guide, Tuscany from Florence, Capri by boat.
Private guides, chartered days on the water and the after-hours openings that earn it.
Tuscany is a day trip that keeps turning into three.
Siena and San Gimignano fit either side of a lunch, the Chianti cellars run from mid-afternoon, and the Val d’Orcia is worth a car of your own. Most of it leaves Florence before eight.
Every Tuscan day out →
Venice empties at six, and that is when it is worth the money.
The day boats unload eighty thousand people onto an island with no roads. Book the Doge’s Palace for the last entry, the gondola for the hour after it, and the glass furnaces on Murano for the morning before any of it starts.
- 1Doge’s Palace Reserved Entry Ticketfrom $41
- 2Grand Canal by Gondola with Live Commentaryfrom $44
- 3La Fenice Opera House Entry Ticket with Audio Guidefrom $14
Pasta made by hand, cellars under Chianti, markets at seven.
Food is not a side trip here, it is the reason half these days exist. Book the market walk before the heat, the class that ends as lunch, and the tasting that finally explains why the Barolo costs what it does.
Three things that happen nowhere else on earth.
Cathedrals and vineyards are all over Europe. A Roman town frozen mid-morning, a ceiling that took four years on scaffolding, and a city that runs on boats are not.
Pompeii and Herculaneum
Vesuvius covered both towns in a single August day in AD 79, and the ash sealed them so completely that bread was still in the ovens and graffiti still on the walls. Pompeii is enormous and mostly roofless; Herculaneum is a quarter of the size, buried deeper, and its upper floors, wooden doors and beds survived. See the small one if you only have a morning.
- 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
The Sistine Chapel ceiling
Michelangelo considered himself a sculptor and took the commission unwillingly, then spent four years on scaffolding painting three hundred figures onto wet plaster. The colours you see are the ones he mixed: a restoration in the 1980s took off four centuries of candle soot and found them shockingly bright. No photographs, and the guards mean it.
- 1Vatican: Museums & Sistine Chapel Entrance Ticket★★★★★★★★★★ 4.5 · 144,003 reviews
- 2Vatican Museums & Sistine Chapel Tour with Optional Basilica★★★★★★★★★★ 4.3 · 67,413 reviews
- 3Vatican Museums, Sistine Chapel & St Peter’s Basilica Guided Tour★★★★★★★★★★ 4.5 · 39,149 reviews
The gondola, honestly
Every gondola is black by law, weighs six hundred kilos, and is built asymmetrically so one oar can drive it straight. The fare is fixed by the city and rises after seven in the evening. The Grand Canal is the postcard, but ask for the side canals: they are quieter, narrower, and the only place the boat makes sense.
- 1Grand Canal Gondola Ride with App Commentary★★★★★★★★★★ 4.1 · 18,908 reviews
- 2Grand Canal by Gondola with Live Commentary★★★★★★★★★★ 4.1 · 13,681 reviews
- 3Venice Walking Tour and Gondola Ride★★★★★★★★★★ 3.5 · 3,630 reviews
Four Italian bookings that will not wait.
Most of this country can be arranged over breakfast on the day. These four run on timed slots, tide tables and a fresco that only lets fifteen people in at a time.
- 01Da Vinci’s Last Supper Guided TourFifteen minutes, twenty-five people at a time, in a climate-controlled room. Milan’s hardest ticket, and it goes months ahead.
- 02Vatican: Museums & Sistine Chapel Entrance TicketEntry is timed and the museums close on Sundays apart from the last one of the month, when they are free and impossible.
- 03Skip-The-Line Uffizi Gallery Timed Entry TicketTimed slots, and the walk-up queue in Florence regularly runs past two hours in summer. Tuesdays are the worst of it.
- 04Exclusive Capri Boat Tour and Optional Blue GrottoThe cave only opens when the sea is flat and the tide is low enough to get a rowing boat under the arch. Some days it never opens at all.
When the shutters come down and the ruins are too hot to walk.
Italy takes its own holiday in August. Family restaurants close for a fortnight around Ferragosto, the cities empty, and any unshaded archaeological site is unbearable from eleven until four. The answer is the same every time: go early, then get under a roof or under a vine.
Rome, Florence, Venice, and the bay below Vesuvius.
Siena
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