Welcome | Village Italy 2024

Village Italy
June 3-16, 2024

Benvenuto and welcome!

My name is Londa and I'm from Portland, Oregon. I'm excited to share my European adventures with you. My friend and neighbor, Sue, and I started a walking routine during COVID. On those walks we did lots of travel dreaming and decided to take a Rick Steves tour.

Fast forward to 2024 and we did it! I have been to Europe a few times and had taken the wonderful Rick Steves Germany, Austria, Switzerland tour with my mom, but I've always had my eye on the Village Italy in 14 days tour. Sue hadn't been to Europe in decades and quickly agreed that Italy was the place to go.

We're ready to take off (I am on the left), and it's time to share my favorite Italian word, andiamo, let's go!

Getting ready

Plane flights booked

Pre-tour and post-tour hotels booked

Rick Steves guide books read and pages torn out.

Yes, you read correctly. Tearing out the sections you need saves weight in your luggage so you can buy that cute scarf you will find at a local market.

I also bought the Rick Steves book, Italy for Food Lovers, and it was enlightening to read about the Italian food/meal philosophy, so different than the USA's. Highly recommend this book.

Here's the map of our fabulous tour. Find out more about Village Italy in 14 Days with the link in the green box.

Village Italy Tour

Helpful hints to view my scrapbook:

1. Look for the andiamo button at the bottom of each page to go to the next day's adventures. You can also follow this journey by clicking on the tabs at the top of the page.

2. I love to stroll passageways in Europe! Can you find all the alleys I ambled?

3. Sprinkled throughout this scrapbook you'll find lots of tips highlighted in blue on why you should take a Rick Steves tour

Pre-tour:
Frankfurt & Venice

The best helpful tip is to arrive a few days before the tour starts. We decided to start our adventures 5 days early. (We're also staying 6 days after the tour, more on that later.)

There is a direct flight to Frankfurt, Germany from Portland so we spent two nights there and got to visit my German foreign exchange student from 2015. We then flew to Venice for three nights where we wandered, ate lots of great food and visited the island of Murano. A short train ride to Padua was all that was left to do before the tour started.