Our favorite part of our honeymoon trip to Europe in 2018 was the four-day hike we took through the Swiss alps. Ever since then we’ve been wanting to go back and do a similar trip in the Italian alps – the Dolomites. This winter, we were able to reserve a six-day backpacking trip at the end of June, then decided to build an entire three-week trip to Italy around it! Despite the heat, we had a blast exploring thousands of years of culture and history, eating delicious meals paired with great wine, and enjoying beautiful scenery in the mountains, coast, and countryside.
Itinerary
- Rome
- Cinque Terre
- Sienna
- Florence
- Dolomites
- Venice

Rome
On our first day in Rome we went on a few different walking tours to explore the city and stave off our jet lag. This is something we repeated a lot on the trip, using an audio guide on a phone and sharing a set of earbuds. We started down by the river at the ‘Jewish Ghetto’ neighborhood, which was a part of Rome’s history we didn’t know anything about. Down by the actual river there was a summer market stretching over a mile with restaurants and other vendors. That night we got to see some of the highlights like the Spanish Steps, Pantheon, and Trevi Fountain.
Our second day in Rome was dedicated to seeing all of the ancient sites and ruins. Emily liked all of the underground features of the Coliseum that let them move people and animals through the floors. Andrew liked seeing how the architecture and building materials on Capitoline Hill changed over time – from ornate marble structures in the beginning to massive, cost-effective brick structures in later eras. It was extremely hot outside but luckily there were plenty of gelato vendors!
The next day was spent almost entirely at the Vatican. We started at the museum but eventually made our way through the Sistine Chapel and into St. Peter’s Basilica. The Basilica was absolutely massive, with matching enormous installations inside. We were able to climb the stairs up into the dome and out onto the roof of the church where we had an excellent view of the area. Afterwards, we rushed through St. Angelo’s Castle across the street before it closed to check out the cannons and get a great view back towards St Peter’s Square.
The Vatican Museum had plenty of great works from antiquity and the renaissance. This was our first dose of Raphael on the trip, and it set a high bar. On our last full day, we visited the Borghese Gallery, which was absolutely amazing. Each room was completely lined with masterpieces, and the sculptures were unbelievably lifelike. There are plenty of other great museums in Rome, but we didn’t want to overdo it because we had so many more to visit on the rest of the trip. However, we did stop at the Capuchin Crypt one afternoon, which has an extremely unique type of exhibit!
Rome probably had the largest variety of food of any city on this trip. We had a few great meals in the Jewish Ghetto (including plenty of fried artichokes), with a particularly memorable dinner at Bella Carne. Of course, we had plenty of gelato and spritzes to combat the heat, too! On our last night in Rome we met up with Emily’s cousin and her husband in Trastevere for pizza. They gave us plenty of suggestions for the rest of the trip!
Cinque Terre
Cinque Terre is a set of five small towns along the coast of Italy, with a hiking trail in between. To get there from Rome, we took a train to the nearby town of La Spezia which is a big part of Italy’s naval history. We explored the old fort in town which has great views of the whole city and harbor. Afterwards, we went to the nearby naval museum which had a ton of great exhibits. We were shocked to find out that early 20th century ‘torpedoes’ were ridden by men in diving suits and manually steered into their targets! We cooled off with some more spritzes then had an amazing multi-course dinner at Andree (Emily was particularly fond of the clam tortellini!)
The next morning, we took a small local train to the first of the five towns, Riomaggiore. Normally, you can walk along the coast between the five towns, but the path between the first three towns is currently closed due to landslides. Fortunately, there is a second path that goes up into the hills (which are beautiful and full of vineyards). But unfortunately, it was extremely hot outside, and the hike was steep! After hiking with our packs to the second town, Manarola, we got some focaccia for lunch and decided to take the local train through a tunnel to the third town, Corniglia, instead of hiking up the hill again. After showering we went out to enjoy dinner and a beautiful sunset in this adorable small town.
The path between the final towns of Cinque Terre was in good enough shape for us to continue hiking the next day, and we were treated with more amazing views. We made it to Vernazza in time for another refreshing lunch of focaccia and beer. Vernazza has a really nice beach and swimming area so we took off our hiking boots and let our feet soak in the cool water for a while before heading out again. The first thing we did when we got to the last town, Montorosso al Mare, was cool down with some fresh lemonade! After checking into our AirBnB we made our way to the beach and alternated between laying in the sun and swimming in the mediteranean.
It happened to be Corpus Christi that day so the town had decorated the entire length of their main pedestrian street with a path of flowers to celebrate. At dinner that night, while Emily was enjoying a particularly good squid soup, a parade marched by to honor the feast day. Later that night we got to taste a flight of local dessert wines, with one made in each of the five towns, from grapes on their nearby hills we had just hiked through!
Sienna
It took almost an entire day to get out of Cinque Terre and travel to Sienna by train. We were staying at an ‘agritourismo’ (basically a B&B on a farm) just outside of Sienna for two nights. The first night we ate some focaccia we had smuggled out of Cinque Terre and paired it with a bottle of wine from the vineyard we were staying at.
The next day we took the bus into town (which was probably more work than it was worth – all of our subsequent trips were done by cab). Sienna is an adorable town with a cute main square and an impressive church built in its brief heyday. The stone color pattern of the church is very distinctive, and the floors are all covered with beautiful, detailed scenes from religion and history. We got the opportunity to climb out on the roof of the church and an adjoining unfinished section of a past-planned expansion to get a good view of Tuscany. This church had an adjoining museum with a variety of engineering drawings for the different iterations of the church layout. The museum also has a huge collection of bits and pieces of dead Saints in golden boxes, which apparently used to be a real tourist attraction back in the day.
We went back to the B&B in the afternoon and took the opportunity to cool off in the pool (did we mention it was extremely hot during this trip?). The hotel served a delicious meal in a cozy little dining area that night, paired of course with their own wine!
Florence
We took a morning train from Sienna to Florence, which was a quick and easy route (despite a train switch we almost missed because it was only announced in Italian!) This left us plenty of time to check out the bargello sculpture museum in the afternoon, which has some really impressive stuff (especially some Donatello’s). We finished up with an amazing dinner at Club Culinaro Toscana (a recommendation from Emily’s cousin, where we had an excellent wild boar ravioli and a really hearty rabbit stew) followed by an evening walk around the heart of the city.
The next day started with a visit to the main church (‘The Duomo’) and its adjoining baptistry and museum. This was a fun contrast to the church we had just seen in Sienna, which was built at a similar time. Of course, we took the option to climb up in the dome and on the roof to see how it all works! The Duomo was definitely larger than the church in Sienna, but it didn’t have as much character and detail inside. This may be because all of the iconic reliefs and statues have been moved into the museum (including a full-scale replica of the facade for the original statues to sit on). The baptistry has its famous doors of course (although the real ones are in the museum…) but a very different style of painting on the inside of the dome. The most interesting part of the church was probably the remnants of a much earlier church with fantastic mosaics that are still accessible underground!
That afternoon we had a quick visit to the ‘Academia’ where we got to see the famous ‘David’ sculpture. We were surprised to see so many exhibits with old instruments, especially the section detailing some of the evolution of the harpsichord and piano. Afterwards, we went to the Galileo Museum. While it is definitely a bit of a tourist trap, it was cool to see all of the old science equipment from back in the day. We thought it was interesting how some of the classic high school physics style ‘experiments’ have been demonstrated in the same way to new students for hundreds of years! That night after dinner (where we continued to feed our cantucci and vin santo habit at dessert) we took a walk down by the river.
For our final full day in Florence we went south of the river to the Uffizi. We spent four hours in the museum, which does an excellent job showing the development of renaissance painting. It also has tons of classical statues (often with questionable heritage and body parts/heads glued on to unrelated torsos!). After lunch we went over to the Piti Palace and Boboli Gardens. The Piti Palace was really crowded with paintings covering every wall, but there was at least one winner in every room. The architecture, carvings, and decorations in each room are so impressive. The Boboli Gardens out back were large and well maintained, but because of the heat we mostly stuck to paths with shade! Eventually we left and found a shady spot to relax and drink a refreshing spritz and negroni.
That night we had a really fun dinner at Trattoria Giovanni (recommended by our friends Bobby and Allison!). The server was very fun and helpful, recommending different dishes and wine that came together wonderfully (Andrew still dreams about the riobolatta stew!) After dinner we walked to one of the many bridges across the river. It was the feast day for St John the Baptist (patron saint of Florence) so the entire town was out that night to watch the fireworks!
The next morning Andrew’s cousin Lisa and her family happened to be arriving in Florence on their own vacation! They were going the opposite direction (having just left Venice) but we got to catch up with them over breakfast before hoping on a morning train to Venice and an afternoon bus to the Dolomites.
Dolomites
Our hike in the dolomites was a 57 mile, six-day trek curving around the mountain town of Cortina d’Amprezzo. The mountains are covered in ski lifts and gondolas for the winter season, but the town also hosts plenty of backpackers, trail runners, and mountain bikers in the summer. Compared to the 90-degree days in most of Italy on this trip, the highs in this are ranged from 60-70 degrees depending on the altitude!
Each day of hiking was 8-12 miles long, with maybe 2000-4000 feet of elevation gain (and loss). The first and last day involved a bus ride in and out of town, and there was at least one gondola ride during the hike! There are tons of mountain huts along the route (‘refugios’) that serve hot meals and board backpackers overnight, so you can pack very light and go further each day. Every day brought us up and over another mountain peak and into a valley (sometimes more than once!) so the views and environment were constantly changing.

Our first day of hiking took us approximately in a loop around a mountain near where the bus dropped us off, then back to the road where we got lunch (gnocci!) at a hut. This trail had some amazing overlooks and took us past a beautiful lake. This is not a common route and we barely ran into anyone else all day!
Afterwards, the trail went up to the ‘cinque torri’ formation where we stayed the night at a different hut. While the rooms or bunks in the huts are very affordable, they definitely make their money selling you cold beer after a long day (which was worth every penny!). This hut was on some kind of dirt access road and had a little cable system rigged to haul goods up to a different hut on a nearby peak without road access.
On the second day we started by taking the ‘long way’ around leaving Cinque Torri for Lagazuoi. This yielded plenty of great view of Cinque Torri, along with the valley to the West, which had more of a rockslide feel to it.
At Lagazuoi we took a (packed) cable car up a few thousand feet to the top where there is another hut and some great views of the valley below. Descending the back of this mountain was slow and treacherous, but there are tons of bunkers and caches leftover from WWI that we explored along the way. When we finally got to the bottom we had a mile or so of flat ground before heading up again through a pass to get to our hut for the night, ‘Fanes’.
We ate a packed lunch that day, but dinner at Fanes was great (amazing barely soup and a hearty roast chicken dinner). This was a very modern hut compared to the previous night (better amenities, but less character). Our feet were starting to get very sore, and we were wondering if this whole trip was a huge mistake! That evening, while Andrew was resting outside on an extremely scenic bench, an entire herd of cows decided to come home for the night and completely surround him! Sadly, we have no picture – but you can imagine the scene with Andrew frozen on the bench, surrounded by cows with their neck-bells jangling, while Emily and a few other European tourists watched on with delight!
Thankfully, the third day was easier (only 8 miles long and 2,500ft of ascent) so our feet had a bit of a break. We started early and kept up a good pace to try and get to our destination hut before the predicted afternoon rain. Our initial hike down into the valley was hot, but we were rewarded with a beautiful stream crossing at a path junction. Our new path began going uphill, and the more we went up the more the grass of the landscape was traded out for rocks and boulders.
We passed by a hut we could have stopped at for lunch in an attempt to continue outrunning the storm. In the final mile before the hut for that night we began looking for marmots among the rocks and almost immediately found one poking its nose out! We got to the hut (‘Bielle’) about half an hour before the storm hit, so while we were sipping hot chocolate inside, we could look out and enjoy some epic scenery accented by the storm clouds.
We had a lot of time to kill hanging around the hut that day, but luckily, we hit it off with a really nice Canadian couple that happened to be staying in the same dormitory as us. Little did we know that we would be hiking the same route as them for the next two days!
The storm continued into the next morning where of course we had our only ridgeline walk in the trip. It was stressful to try and keep an eye on the trail at the ridge (marked only by cairns, and not well traveled) while staying off to the side and low in case of lightning, all while balancing on smooth wet rocks! At the end of the ridgeline, we ducked into a hut to begin to dry off and warm up with some coffee.
By that point the rain was starting to peter out and we descended the mountain without much difficulty. It was very eerie to walk down into clouds covering the valley below us! The sun came out in time for us to get a delicious hot meal at an extremely fancy resort (we were the only ones there!) This lifted our spirits, and we enjoyed the rest of the walk through the woods and pastures.
The hut for this night, ‘Prato Piazza’, was grouped with a few other buildings (hotels and resorts) in a very scenic, lush valley. In the final stretch before the hut the trail crossed a creek and changed from rocky to muddy, and we were surrounded by flowers and thick grass. The hut was very modern and comfortable (we even spotted a Starlink Antenna on the roof!) so we had a hot shower, got a beer, and watched the remaining clouds from the storm ripple through the mountains.
After two fairly short days we were well rested (with feet properly calloused) and ready for another 11 mile day, with 5,000 feet of ascent! The main attraction in the morning was the 360-degree panoramic view atop what we called the ‘strudel saddle’ (‘strudelkopfsattel’), which we reached after an hour of hiking out of the valley.
From there, we descended about 3,000 feet following switchbacks, streams, stairways, and tunnels until we finally made it into another valley. We had lunch and a beer with our friends from Canada before saying goodbye and beginning the 3,500 foot ascent to our next hut, ‘Tre Cime’, named after the famous rock climbing formation there. It was a brutal climb across a few different ecosystems but we took our time and ate plenty of snacks. However, with about an hour remaining storm clouds began to appear, and we quickened our pace! We caught about 10 minutes of really heavy rain at the end but stayed dry because of all the gear we had on.
It was hard not to stop and take a million pictures in that last stretch because Tre Cime is one of the most photogenic landscapes of the entire trip! The hut has a massive, covered porch overlooking the formation so we were able to enjoy it dry and with a beer. Because of its location this hut has no fresh water and runs on a generator, but that didn’t stop them from cooking us a hearty meal of chicken and mashed potatoes!
On our last day we woke up early to a cloudless sky which gave us one last chance to enjoy the view of Tre Cime before heading the opposite direction toward the peak of Cima Una. We passed a few shallow, clear alpine lakes on our way and the trail hugged the side of a cliff, sometimes with a sketchy wooden platform.
Before heading up the steep trail to the peak of Cima Una we stopped in a small hut to get a strudel and coffee. The hike up was steep, poorly marked in some areas, but extremely rewarding (and maybe a little scary!). There are craggily mountains in some directions, and large valleys in others!
It was mostly downhill from there! We had to keep our pace up in order to catch a bus back into town at the next hut, ‘Auronzo’. The path to the hut winds through another valley and ends up on the other side of Tre Cime from where we began in the morning. We had a quick lunch at an extremely touristy hut only a mile from the bus stop then walked the final stretch. We almost got on the wrong bus but picked the right one just before it left. Back in town, we showered at the hotel then went out for beer and pretzels, our last alpine meal before heading back to ‘real’ Italy the next morning!
Venice
Our bus from the Dolomites arrived in Venice in the afternoon. We walked from the bus terminal to our hotel, navigating the complete maze of a city (where GPS has trouble getting down into the walkways!) for a half hour until we got there. We went out to do a walking tour of the main highlights of the city, ending in St. Marks’s Square. That night we had a really fun dinner at Ai Mercanti where the waitress made it her mission in life to find the absolute best wine pairing for us (we didn’t have the heart to tell her that we don’t have a refined enough palette to appreciate it!) Emily’s octopus was particularly good.
Our first full day was devoted to ferrying between the various famous islands in the lagoon. Our first stop was Burano (the lace island) where we started by walking around and enjoying all of the fun pastel-colored buildings. After browsing through the lace museum for a while (it had plenty of beautiful lace, but not much on how to make lace) we picked up a fun souvenir and caught a ferry out. The next island, Murano, is known for its glasswork. After a quick lunch we went to the glass museum which had a ton of information on how the trade changed over the centuries. The exhibit on how glassmakers could build 2D images from thin colored glass sticks, then draw them out into super tiny thin sticks in aggregate, was mind-blowing. Andrew spent an hour shopping for the perfect glass sailboat souvenir, but ultimately came up empty-handed.
After cooling off with some spritzes (by this point we had determined that the hugo spritz was the best option!) we caught a ferry back to the main island. On the way the ferry had to stop for almost 10 minutes because there was a gondola race going on right in front of us!
The next morning we walked over to the Doge’s Palace nearby St Mark’s Square. It had a good mix of ornate architecture, cultural and military displays, and ‘lifestyle’ exhibits like a tour through the dungeons. It was interesting to learn more about the history of Venice and its politics – its seemed like they managed to remain a stable government for so long because any time people started doing something wasteful (like building lavish gondolas, or escalating competitions at a carnival) the ruling class would just outlaw it.
In the afternoon we went over to see the venetian arsenal and its nearby naval museum. The naval museum had a full history of maritime tradition from the earliest gondolas all the way to World War II battleships. It also had maps of the various overseas ports from Venice’s heyday, showing how they basically made a ‘mini-Venice’ everywhere – a fort on the coast surrounded by a moat.
For dinner we went looking for some good ‘cicchetti’ – kind of like Italian tapas. We found some really good snacks at ‘Osteria Ae Forcoe’. We especially liked the venetian cod paste bruschetta (it reminded us of our trip to Portugal and Spain!) and the bartender helped us find good wines to pair with the cicchetti by the glass.
We started our final day in Venice at the Correr Museum. This showed a different side of Venice (when it was ruled by the Austrians in the 19th century) and included some really impressive ceiling accent paintings that were indistinguishable from actual molded plaster. Next, we had a special lunch at Osteria Alle Testiere (we had to reserve it over a month out!) The razor clam appetizer was fantastic, and the rest of the meal just kept getting better!
After lunch we walked back to St Mark’s Square to finally check out the inside of St. Mark’s Cathedral. Its Byzantine influence was very apparent – the interior was nothing like we had seen the previous three weeks all over Italy. With some time to kill in the afternoon we took a trip down the Grand Canal in a non-express ferry while listening to an audio tour. It really hammered home how ridiculous of a city Venice is in the modern era. We had cichetti for dinner again, bouncing between a few places, then ended the night with possibly the best gelato of the trip at Gallonetto.
Summary
It’s hard to believe that in three weeks we could barely even see half of Italy! We learned a lot from our previous trip to Europe and managed to balance museums, food, activities, and down time really well. We came away with a much larger appreciation for wine and renaissance art, and our hike through the dolomites is something we will never forget!