Travelling in Italy: a country wider than its itinerary

Why the Grand Tour still sets the route

Tourism in the modern sense reached Italy in the second half of the seventeenth century, and it arrived with a book. Richard Lassels, a Roman Catholic priest, published Voyage to Italy in 1670, and the Grand Tour it helped trigger carried European aristocrats, many of them British, along a fixed sequence of Italian cities for the next century and a half.

That sequence is worth reading as an itinerary, because it still is one. Travellers entered at Turin. Milan was a stop nobody considered essential and many simply passed through it. Anyone arriving by boat spent a few days in Genoa. Venice was the required stop in the north, together with Verona, Vicenza and Padua nearby. Tuscany came next, with Florence the major attraction and Siena, Pisa, Lucca and San Gimignano behind it. Rome was the point of the whole undertaking. After Rome the tour went down to the Bay of Naples, and Pompeii and Herculaneum joined the itinerary after their discovery in 1710. Sicily was a serious extension of the trail, and Goethe was among those who made it.

Rail arrived around 1840 and the Grand Tour began to fall out of fashion as the Victorian middle classes started touring the country, but the destinations held: Venice, Florence, Rome, Naples and Sicily. What the nineteenth century added was the coast. The first seaside resorts appeared on the Ligurian shore, around Venice, along coastal Tuscany and at Amalfi. Grand hotels went up at Sanremo, Lido di Venezia, Viareggio and Forte dei Marmi, Capri and Ischia and Procida and Elba grew popular, and the northern lakes of Como, Maggiore and Garda were visited more often.

Everything since has been a variation on the same map. Tourism collapsed from about 1929 and stayed down until after the Second World War, then returned with the Italian economic miracle and with films such as La Dolce Vita. By the 1960s cheap hotels and pensioni had put a coastal holiday within reach of a working-class Italian family. The late 1960s brought mountain holidays and skiing, with resorts and chalets built in Piedmont and the Aosta Valley, and Milan became a destination on its own account in the late 1980s as its position in fashion hardened.

The volume is now very large. Italy recorded 61.5 million international tourists in 2025. On Bank of Italy estimates published in 2018, the sector directly generates more than 5% of national GDP, 13% once indirect effects are counted, and accounts for over 6% of everyone employed.

What overtourism has done to Venice

Venice, the Vatican and the Cinque Terre have all reported problems with overtourism, and Venice is the case that has been counted. Fewer than 50,000 residents lived in the Centro Storico in 2023, against a reported 175,000 in the 1970s. On a busy day the count of visitors arriving for the day alone reaches 85,000, which is more people than live in the historic city. 30% of its available residential apartments are let to tourists.

The documented causes are the volume of cruise ship passengers, day visitors who outnumber residents and overnight guests together, and home-sharing platforms that price residents out of the housing stock.

Two interventions are on the record. Large cruise ships have been banned from entering the historic centre since 2021, after UNESCO threatened to place Venice on its list of World Heritage in danger over damage to the lagoon. In 2024 the city introduced an entry fee for day trippers on peak days between April and June, and by late 2024 it was being reported that the fee had failed to reduce numbers.

The Carnival is the clearest measure of what the city absorbs. The Venetian Senate proclaimed a public festival for the day before the start of Lent in 1296, which is the first documentation of the event, and about 3 million people now travel to Venice for the modern version of it.

How Italy tries to move visitors off the route

Two national schemes and one law exist to push traffic away from the cities, and all three predate the current argument about crowding.

I Borghi piu belli d'Italia was created in 2001 on the initiative of the tourism council of the national association of Italian municipalities, to keep small towns of high historic and artistic value from degradation, depopulation and abandonment. Its motto is Il fascino dell'Italia nascosta, the charm of hidden Italy. As of November 2023 it listed 361 villages, and it organises festivals, exhibitions and concerts inside them.

The Bandiera arancione works differently. It is a quality award given by the Touring Club Italiano to inland towns of at most 15,000 inhabitants that meet a standard for hospitality, assessed through a territorial analysis model the club built for the purpose. The idea began in 1998 at Sassello, in Liguria, and as of June 2021 the group included 252 villages.

The railways came third. Law 128 of 9 August 2017 gave legal protection to disused, suspended and abolished railway lines of cultural and scenic value, along with their stations and rolling stock, and named a first list of 18 such lines; the list had reached 26 by 2022. Ferrovie dello Stato established a company called FS Treni Turistici Italiani in July 2023 to run three grades of service on them: luxury trains, express and historic trains, and regional trains.

The material all this points at is genuinely spread out. Italy ratified the World Heritage Convention on 23 June 1978 and has 62 inscribed properties as of 2026, of which 56 are cultural and 6 natural, with 30 more on its tentative list. Half the visitors to those sites were foreign as of 2021, and three quarters of the foreign half were in the country for a cultural holiday. The six natural properties show how far the list reaches from the cities the Grand Tour named.

When the country fills up and empties again

Three peaks are recorded across the year: winter, for Christmas and New Year; spring, for Easter; and summer, for the weather. Domestic travel adds six more, clustered on three civil holidays and three religious ones.

The Christmas period is longer than the two dates suggest. It opens on 8 December with the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, the day the tree traditionally goes up, and closes on 6 January with the Epiphany, with 26 December a public holiday in between. The nativity scene is an Italian invention: the first of them, a living one, was set up by Francis of Assisi at Greccio in 1223. The oldest Christmas market in the country is considered to be Bologna's, first held in the eighteenth century.

The winter map and the Easter map are not the same map. International visitors at Christmas concentrate in Milan, Rome, Naples, Catania, Palermo and Cagliari, a list that reaches Sicily and Sardinia. At Easter they concentrate in Rome, Milan, Venice, Naples, Florence and Bologna, which is the Grand Tour with Bologna added.

Individual events move large numbers on their own. The Palio di Siena has been run without interruption since the 1630s. Calcio Fiorentino, an early form of football, is still played every year in Piazza Santa Croce in Florence. The Carnival of Viareggio, whose first parade was held in 1873, draws more than 500,000 spectators, and the Carnival of Ivrea is fought with oranges thrown between people on foot and troops on carts.

How the weather changes down the peninsula

The sea surrounds Italy on every side except the north and acts as a reservoir of heat and humidity, which produces a Mediterranean climate with heavy local variation. The length of the peninsula and the mountains behind it do the rest. Inland northern and central areas, Turin and Milan and Bologna among them, run from humid subtropical through humid continental to oceanic. The coast of Liguria, Tuscany and most of the south fits the Mediterranean profile.

Average winter temperatures run from 0 °C in the Alps to 12 °C in Sicily, and average summer temperatures from 20 °C to above 25 °C. The spread inside a single winter day is the more useful figure for anyone planning: it can be 2 °C below zero and snowing in Milan while Rome sits at 8 °C and Palermo at 20 °C. In summer the north and south are much closer together.

Coastal winters are mild and coastal summers hot and dry, while the higher ground inland is cold, wet and often snowy in the same months, and lowland valleys are hot in July and August. Northern and central Italy get strong thunderstorms from spring through to autumn.

Almost 40% of the territory is mountainous. The Apennines run 1,350 km from Liguria to Calabria and on into northern Sicily, and nineteen of the regions are crossed by the Alps or the Apennines or their offshoots, which is why winter and summer tourism both operate in the same places. Milano Cortina holds the Winter Olympic Games in 2026.

What it takes to cross the country

Rail is the strongest part of the network. As of December 2025 it totalled 16,881 km, of which 12,364 km is electrified, with 4,802 locomotives and railcars running on it, managed by Rete Ferroviaria Italiana under Ferrovie dello Stato Italiane. High-speed services run in three grades: Frecciarossa at up to 300 km/h on dedicated high-speed track, Frecciargento at up to 250 km/h on high-speed and main lines, and Frecciabianca at up to 200 km/h on main lines only. Eleven rail crossings carry trains through the Alps to neighbouring countries.

Italy was the first country to build motorways, the autostrade, which are mostly toll roads. In 2002 the serviceable road network came to 668,721 km, including 6,487 km of motorway, and about 34,667,000 cars and 4,015,000 goods vehicles were circulating on it in 2005.

There are approximately 130 airports, 99 of them with paved runways, and the two hubs are Leonardo da Vinci in Rome and Malpensa in Milan; air passengers numbered about 148 million in 2011, roughly a tenth of the European total that year. Forty-three major seaports were counted in 2004, Genoa among them, and the inland waterway network runs to 1,477 km of navigable rivers and channels. Commuter ferries connect towns on both sides of Lake Garda and Lake Como. Seven cities have metro systems, Milan's with five lines and Rome's with three.

Why the coast takes half the traffic

Coastal resorts account for 53% of the total tourist flow. Italy has about 8,000 km of coast on the Adriatic, Ionian, Tyrrhenian and Ligurian seas, and the named stretches run the length of it: the Italian Riviera from the French border to the Gulf of La Spezia, then the Cinque Terre, the Amalfi and Cilentan coasts, the Coast of the Gods in Calabria, the Costa Verde and the Costa Smeralda in Sardinia.

The accommodation figures show the same thing from the other side. In 2017 there were 32,988 hotels with 1,133,452 rooms and 2,239,446 beds, and 171,915 non-hotel facilities with 2,798,352 beds between them, so more of the country's beds sit in campsites, tourist villages, rented rooms and agriturismi than in hotels. The best-equipped municipalities that year make the specialisation visible: Grosseto had 217 farmhouse facilities, Vieste had 84 campsites and tourist villages, and Cortina d'Ampezzo had 20 mountain huts.

Protection covers a good deal of what is left. National parks take in about 5% of the country, parks and reserves together about 11%, and 12% of the coastline is protected.

There is also a substantial trade underground. Italian caves draw around one and a half million visitors a year, concentrated near the Alps and the Apennines where the karst is, and the Castellana Caves, the Frasassi Caves, Neptune's Grotto, the Blue Grotto and the Ear of Dionysius are among the ones open to visitors.

What visitors come to eat and drink

Foreign tourists spent 9.23 billion euros on food and wine in 2018, an average of 117 euros each. Underneath that sits a dense system of protected designations: PDO, PGI, TSG and GI recognitions granted by the European Union from the 1950s onwards, the national Indicazione geografica tipica, the regional Prodotti agroalimentari tradizionali and the municipal Denominazione comunale d'origine, with DOC and DOCG applying to wine and separate protections in olive growing.

Regional divergence is the whole point of eating in Italy, and it is sharpest between the north and the south. Italy: culture sets out what the cuisine is built on. What matters for travel is that the fairs are fixed points in the calendar: Vinitaly is held at Verona every April, EuroChocolate has run at Perugia since 1993, and the Terra Madre Salone del Gusto is held at Turin every two years. Milan holds what is recorded as the oldest restaurant in the country, the Antica trattoria Bagutto, in existence since at least 1284.