10 Day Italy Itinerary

Ten days is the sweet spot for first-time visitors — long enough to do Italy justice without finishing the trip exhausted. This is the route we recommend most often to travellers coming from Australia and New Zealand for their first Italian experience: it pairs three genuinely distinct sides of the country in a single logical journey south.

You’ll begin with the monumental weight of Rome — two millennia of history stacked on top of itself — then drop down into Campania for the volcanic drama of Pompeii and the vertiginous beauty of the Amalfi Coast, before finishing in Puglia: the heel of the boot, largely untouched by mass tourism and completely unlike anywhere else in Italy. The rhythm matters as much as the route. We’ve deliberately built in slower afternoons and unscheduled time because the best moments in Italy rarely happen on a printed itinerary.

Days 1–2 — Rome: start where Italy begins

Rome asks something of you that other cities don’t. Before you can appreciate it, you need to let the scale of the place sink in — the fact that you’re walking over layers of civilisation that stretch back 2,700 years. Give yourself the first afternoon simply to get oriented: take a slow walk from your hotel to the Pantheon, find a table in a side street and order a spritz, and let the city come to you.

Day one is for ancient Rome: the Colosseum, Forum and Palatine Hill together form one of the most moving archaeological sites in the world. We’d suggest booking the arena floor access if you can — standing where the gladiators stood lands differently to viewing it from the tiers. The Capitoline Museums are underrated and uncrowded compared to what follows; the late afternoon light on the Forum from the terrace is worth the ticket alone. Walk to Trastevere for dinner — the cacio e pepe in any of the neighbourhood trattorias will set the tone for the week.

Day two: the Vatican. Book ahead, go early, and accept that the Sistine Chapel will be crowded — it always is, and it still stops you in your tracks. Allow three hours minimum. Afternoon to the Spanish Steps, Trevi Fountain and the lanes around Campo de’ Fiori. The evening is yours: Rome at night, with the fountains lit and the temperature dropping, is one of the great pleasures of Italian travel.

→ Want more time in Rome? Our Essential Rome Cultural Tour and Palaces & Villas of Rome go deeper — two to three days of specialist-guided access to the city’s layers that most visitors never reach.

Day 3 — South to Sorrento

Take the high-speed train from Roma Termini to Naples (70 minutes), then the Circumvesuviana railway along the coast to Sorrento. It sounds straightforward, and it is — but the moment the train rounds the headland and the Bay of Naples opens up with Vesuvius sitting enormous across the water, you’ll understand why this corner of Italy has been drawing travellers for centuries.

Sorrento is your base for the next four nights. Don’t be put off by its reputation as a tourist town — the centro storico behind the clifftop hotels is genuinely lovely, all narrow lanes, lemon groves and ceramic workshops. Spend the afternoon wandering: the views across to Vesuvius from the clifftop gardens are best in the late afternoon light, and the limoncello here is the real thing, made from the thick-skinned lemons that grow on every terrace.

Day 4 — Pompeii and Herculaneum

Both, if you can manage it. Most visitors choose one; our specialists’ advice is to do both in the same day — they tell completely different stories about the same catastrophic event.

Start at Pompeii in the morning, when it’s cooler and the site is quietest. What stops people here isn’t just the scale — it’s the intimacy of the detail: the ruts worn into the stone streets by cart wheels, the election graffiti still visible on walls, the loaves of bread still sitting in the bakery ovens. A guided visit makes an enormous difference; the context transforms what you’re seeing.

In the afternoon, take the Circumvesuviana one stop to Herculaneum (Ercolano). Smaller, more compact, and — because it was buried under volcanic mud rather than ash — preserved in extraordinary detail. You can see original wooden furniture, carbonised food in shop displays, vivid frescoes in colours that haven’t faded in 2,000 years. Most visitors to the Amalfi Coast never make it to Herculaneum. That’s their loss.

→ Going deeper underground? Our Pompeii & Herculaneum Archaeology Tour pairs specialist-guided access to both sites with context that transforms the experience from a walk through ruins into something genuinely unforgettable.

Days 5–6 — The Amalfi Coast

Two days on one of the world’s most celebrated stretches of coastline. Base yourself in Positano or Ravello rather than Amalfi town itself — both offer better access to the walking paths and ferry connections that make the coast worth lingering on.

On day five, take the ferry along the coast to Amalfi — the approach by water, with the town stacked up the cliff face, is the way to arrive. Explore the 9th-century Duomo and its Arab-Norman cloister, which manages to feel entirely different from anything you’ll have seen in Rome, then follow the lemon-perfumed lanes up into the hills above the town.

On day six, make the drive up to Ravello for the gardens of Villa Cimbrone — the Terrace of Infinity, perched on the cliff edge with views straight down to the sea, is one of those views that stays with you. Allow a full morning. Spend the afternoon on the beach at Fornillo in Positano — quieter and more local than the main beach — and let the coast work on you the way it’s supposed to.

One honest note: the coast road (SS163) is narrow, spectacular and genuinely slow. That’s part of the experience. Build in extra time for every journey and don’t try to see too much in a single day.

→ Want the full coastal experience? Our Amalfi Coast Tour 2026 spends five nights based in Amalfi itself, with a seventh-generation limoncello producer, a hands-on cooking class in Ravello, and a boat trip back along the coastline from Positano. Our Sorrento, Capri & Amalfi Mini Tour is a shorter, easier-to-add option for those combining with other parts of Italy.

Day 7 — The journey to Puglia

This is a transition day, and it’s worth treating it as one rather than trying to squeeze in sightseeing. Take the ferry from Salerno to Bari — the crossing takes about 15 hours overnight, which means you arrive in Puglia fresh rather than exhausted, having watched the heel of Italy come into view at dawn. Alternatively, the drive via the A3 motorway through Basilicata is a beautiful route in its own right: empty mountain landscapes, ancient hill towns, a completely different Italy to anything you’ve seen so far.

Arrive in the Valle d’Itria or Alberobello by evening. The light in Puglia at the end of the day is extraordinary — lower, warmer, more golden than further north — and the first sight of a trullo landscape, those white conical-roofed stone houses scattered across the olive groves, tells you clearly that you’ve arrived somewhere unlike the rest of Italy.

Days 8–9 — Puglia

Two days to explore the heel of the boot. The scale of Puglia surprises people — it’s a big region with a lot of distance between its highlights — so we’d suggest picking a base in the Valle d’Itria and radiating out rather than moving accommodation every day.

Alberobello is the obvious trulli town, and yes, it’s crowded in the centre, but the Monti district on the hill above the main piazza is quieter and the density of the trulli there is genuinely remarkable. Lecce, to the south, is the baroque capital of the region — a city of pale golden limestone so worked and carved and curlicued that it looks almost edible — and it deserves at least half a day. In between: Ostuni (the white town on the hill, one of the more photogenic places in Italy), the masseria landscape of the Fasano plateau, the beach towns of the Adriatic coast.

Reserve day nine for the optional day trip to Matera, just across the regional border in Basilicata. Italy has many extraordinary places, but Matera is one of the few that genuinely stops people in their tracks — a city of stone cave dwellings carved into a ravine, continuously inhabited for 9,000 years and now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. If you’ve never heard of it, you won’t be the first visitor to arrive without expectations and leave having moved it to the top of their “places I need to come back to” list.

→ More time in the south? Our Puglia & Matera 10-Day Tour gives the region the depth it deserves. For the full south-to-heel experience, Best of Puglia 2026 and The Road Less Travelled, Puglia both go beyond the obvious highlights into slower, less-visited territory. Our specialist team can also build you a private itinerary combining the route on this page with deeper Puglia time — speak to us about tailoring this trip.

Day 10 — Bari and farewell

Your last morning is Bari — specifically Bari Vecchia, the old city, which is one of those places that manages to be completely authentic in the middle of a working Italian port city. The lanes are some of the narrowest in southern Italy and the women of the neighbourhood still make orecchiette pasta on their doorsteps each morning, rolling the ear-shaped pasta by hand in the same way it’s been done for generations. It’s not a performance — it’s Tuesday.

The morning market near the harbour is your last opportunity to stock up: DOP olive oil from the local mills, burrata and stracciatella made fresh that day, taralli biscuits, and nduja if your luggage can take it. Bari Karol Wojtyla Airport is a 20-minute taxi from the old city; most international connections route through Rome or another European hub.