Faye and I recently returned from Italy, a wonderful country that we last visited in 1985. The cuisine and the wine were even better than we remembered from our last trip.
One of the things that has changed is the emergence of RV’s across “the boot”. According to IdeaMerge, there are over 2000 campgrounds frequented by RV’ers in Italy. Their prevalence surprised us for a couple of reasons: there’s a lot less space in Italy than in North America – 58 million people in an area just larger than Arizona; and gas prices there are about twice what they are in the US. On the other hand, rigs were smaller than at home, and since stuff is closer together there are fewer miles to pump up for!
This trip, we visited two great areas that RV’rs may wish to consider: Cinque Terre National Park and Tuscany. Cinque Terre, in Liguria region, is a mediterranean coastal preserve that includes five main villages: these are (from north to south) Monterosso al Mare, Vernazza, Corniglia, Manarola and Riomaggiore. The villages themselves are limited to foot traffic but each of them has a car park above it and it is possible to park RV’s.
Footpaths criss-cross the park and gorgeous hikes took us through forests, past vineyards and along the stunning Ligurian coastline.
Tuscany is famous for Florence’s statue of David, olive oils and red wines. RV’rs can tour hundreds of wineries and whenever there’s a sign “Diretto Al Publico” you can stop and do some tasting. Watch out though if you’re the driver – in one place they simply placed five different wine bottles in front of us, left us alone and said, “help yourselves”!
We enjoyed the Chianti Classico region, where the vineyards crawl through lush valleys overlooked by 17th century castles and dotted by medieval villages like Radda-in-Chianti. Lots of room for RV’s in this territory. The views were so incredible and the wines so good it was hard to see how anyone gets any work done there!
If you’re interested in a trip to Italy, you can check out our Cinque Terre and Tuscany Trip Journal ; and lots more Italy trip journals at http://mytripjournal.com/explore/italy.
Dan Parlow
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