custom travel itineraries to italy

December 26, 2019December 26, 2019 | a love letter to rome and italy!

CUSTOM TRAVEL ITINERARY TO ITALY – click here!

($200 for a basic TRAVEL ITINERARY)

CUSTOM TAILORED ITINERARY:

$300.00 – 5 days / $600.00 – 10 days / $900.00 – 15 days

(other prices can be customized in choose your own package, contact me at: rebecca@romepix.com)

A custom Itinerary: example: 5 days / $300 : Multiple cities, resorts, hotels, any time frame, focus on specific interests and pursuits, tailor made precisely to your tastes and desires. One hour phone or Skype consultation is available by request, but there are unlimited email questions and requests which tend to satisfy most trip goals. Whatever you prefer. I can design your DREAM TRIP TO ITALY. (Rome – with Daytrips).

(including the general:) cross section travel itinerary for Italy including Rome, Florence, Venice, Capri and Amalfi Coast, Naples and Campania and Sorrento, and 4 day trips per city!

What to do, see, eat, drink, and where to stay on trips designed for: 24 hours, 1-2 days, 3 days, 5 days. 7 days, 10 days, 2 weeks, and longer.

Art and museum and architecture recommendations: what villas, buildings, and churches to visit for architecture, art masterpieces like Caravaggio and less well known works, Latin masses, Byzantine decor, choral recitals, special holiday galas, masses in a variety of languages, hidden histories of patron saints, churches built on top of ancient Roman and Etruscan ruins, Gothic churches, and major pilgrimage sites.

How to get past ALL the lines in Rome and Florence for museums.

The five museums in Rome you cannot skip!!

Best times to visit the cities versus the seaside spots.

How to walk the 3000 year old pathway of Classical Antiquity in one day in Rome.

The BEST ROMAN (AND GREEK!) RUINS in ITALY (especially in Rome) in fascinating, historical detail with maps, and a clearcut and fascinating set of walking tours through Pompeii!

Secret spots of Roman Emperors on beautiful islands.

For every budget: Hotels, air bnbs, apartments, rental villas, convents and monasteries for pilgrims, and hostels!

Slow Food Italy: eat authentic Italian cuisine by region, eat seasonally, what wines to drink where and when, the best gelato, cocktails in Rome and Naples, the best cafes in Rome, Florence, and Naples. Best seafood, best chocolates, top ten tea rooms in Italy. How to drink Italian wine and order any local dish with confidence in Rome. Shopping for deals for made in Italy bonafide artisan goods, olive oils, spices, pastas, and more. The best desserts and the best pizza in Napoli. How to get Neapolitan pizza in Rome cooked in a 500 year old oven. The local watering holes and bookshops and supermercatos – for half the cost of tourist spots. How to break your cafe bill in half like a local. FRUGAL BUDGET TRAVEL that is elegant and authentic!

30 best spots to photograph Romantic Rome and top five spots to watch the sunset. Photography tips for capturing the beauty and color of Rome. Swimming day trips from Rome and Naples. Shopping artisan goods: gourmet foods, wines, liquors, sandals and shoes, fashion, hand painted tiles, coffee beans, art, perfume, monastic and convent handmade products, spice markets, cooking schools, souvenirs and mementos. Limoncello and vineyard visits.

Easy to follow, informative, beauty-focused historical art walks of Italy.

Literary and cinematic fun and glamorous mini-tours of Rome, Florence, and Campania.

Top ten in depth profiles of the best villa art museums with museum cafe reviews and garden walks.

Top ten fountain hopping romantic walks at night in Rome.

Tons of events and easy to navigate for mums and dads with babies and children in the Family Guide To Italy.

A respectful and realistic guide to traveling in style and comfort in Italy with physical disabilities.

The Elder guide to traveling in Italy during your Golden Years.

How to see Italy solo (safely and with fulfilling solitary and group ideas).

How to see the big things in Rome and throw in a few off the beaten path sightseeing (and eating) without exhausting yourself.

The honeymooners and lovers romantic itinerary.

Students in Italy (how to get cultured and still have fun AND stay safe while you study in the beautiful country of Italy).

Green eco travel! Hikers and swimmers and nature lover things to do and experience.

(Major and minor) food allergies and sober travelers: the most in depth guide you can find on how to eat and drink beautifully and healthfully in Italy in any city or town without getting sick or centering a trip around alcohol. Support group meetings, 12 steps, and recovery guides, medical contacts, recommended doctors and psychologists and help lines in Italy.

Historical Italy: Etruscans, Romans, Middle Ages, Renaissance, Baroque, Counter Reformation, Romantic Poets and Artists Era, Victorian, Fascist Era, 1950s/1960s renaissance, Modern 21st Century Italy.

Holidays in Rome.

Seasonal delights and attractions.

The most up to date information on Holidaying in Rome.

Pilgrimages. Sojourns. Art meccas. Study art in a workshop at the Florence School of Academic Art. Take a cooking class. Go to a vineyard and attend a wine tasting. Attend a classic music concert on a rooftop designed by Borromini, overlooking the Bernini fountains and cupolas of the ancient Piazza Navona or attend an intimate opera performance in a room full of Caravaggios. Follow the footsteps of the English and German Romantics. Take architectural walking and driving tours.

Maps and many images to utilize to make your holiday to Italy fun, easy, off the beaten path, and unforgettable!

And much much much more! email rebecca@romepix.com for questions.

a secret garden to the sea

September 26, 2019 | a love letter to rome and italy!

There is an overgrown but perfect secret garden path behind an old villa in Sorrento we stumbled upon one day, and we followed down the rambling, winding trees and shrubbery and lemon and olive trees and blossoming flowers and into the shadows of green.

The further in we wandered, the thicker the growth grew. And yet everything was lush and cared for. Nothing dead, nothing abandoned.

We could smell the sea and the sun rays in the air, carried through cracks in the dense thicket. And so we followed the salt and the promise of blue until we reached the top of a cliff cut thousands of years ago, overlooking the crashing sea and rocks. The birds cried and dove for fish and soared the bright skies. We were alone in our own little paradise. It’ll be ours forever in memory.

Circe in the moment / Napoli

September 23, 2019 | a love letter to rome and italy!

It’s the moments that flicker past your half-closed eyes — like blinding patches of sunlight you can’t help but look directly into — for that sweet temptation of pain that’s warm and bright and just stinging enough to feel more alive, more wild, to feel right now — but you turn away before you burn because we all want to see again eventually, we need to see clearly the far off promises of beautiful experiences something just within reach, a blue horizon haze of blue and gray and green … some imperceptible breath away from the first day of the rest of your every thing. Every thing that will make it all worthwhile. That will make you worthwhile.

That will make you before we’re all undone in the shadows. ———

Napoli is a metamorphosis, a beautiful growling animal built by Circe’s hands, singing songs to travelers who love a little doom and gloom with their beauty.

Death becomes her.

beautiful and inexpensive art prints of italy

March 7, 2018 | a love letter to rome and italy!

Interested in buying any of my images of Rome or in Italy?

The site sends professional lab large prints or posters direct to you.

You can make cards & books too. http://romepix.smugmug.com

Don’t see an image you wanted? Let me know, I add daily. rebecca@romepix.com

Have a poster printed of the Eternal City Rome. The Ruins and the Roman Forum shot on fine art portra 400 film with cupolas and marble and a sweeping view of Roma. Frame or tack up a stunning 16″x 24″ inch poster at the incredible price of a mere $79-$95!

Beautiful 12″x18″ Fine Art Roman Print of Venus / Aphrodite at the Vatican Museum. This is a GORGEOUS statue. 12″x18″ Glossy Shiny Kodak Endura professional paper finish, brighter than Matte only $40 PERFECT for framing or hanging on its own as wall art.

Beautiful 8×12 Portra Fine Art Film Print of Capri from the ruins of an Emperor’s palace. 8×12 Metallic – lustrous Kodak Endura professional paper – only $18.00 or rich 8×12 Lustre, Glossy, or Matte $17-$17.50

the wild beauty of Capri

February 11, 2018 | a love letter to rome and italy!

Capri is an island known for glamour, and while there is plenty of that in the air and along the charming pedestrian lanes of Capri Town and upper Anacapri in the haute couture shops, Grande Dame hotels, and restaurants… the true Capri is found off the beaten path wandering silent side streets and hiking in wildflower, woodsy meadows until you reach stunning 360 degree views of the cliffs below and the sea. This view above is of the famed Faraglioni Rocks; coastal and oceanic rock formation eroded for many many years by waves. Faraglioni is possibly from the Greek pharos or Latin pharus (“lighthouse”) and is correlated to the Spanish farallón. Some locals have told me it means the wild strawberry, for its similar shape to the tiny, bittersweet berry.There is a sublime pleasure in wandering around the island on your own and discovering ancient overgrown paths hinting of ancient Roman history of the Neapolitan isle. You can hike the “back way, the 19th century way” from the Villa Lysis to Tiberius’ most visited ruins, the Villa Tiberius. It is a little treacherous at times but completely satisfying to climb where many have tried before you. The clean scent of the sea is carried on the wind as is the perfume of lemon trees and bergamot and roses and freesia warming in the sun all day. There are so many different breath taking views on Capri that I recommend staying for a few days if you can. A day trip can be a lovely experience if you retreat from the crowds and do something spontaneous and pleasurable at a slow travel pace, but nothing beats waking up hours before the day-trippers descend and exploring the magical side of this Campania treasure. Each turn is unexpected but you never feel truly lost. Unexpected joys are found in a simple moment of beauty – it transfixes and transforms your heart and even how you decipher beauty, see the world, view love, and even how you look at yourself. Have a glass of wine or tea and look at all the beauty of nature around you, and feel the timelessness of Italia, and the bittersweetness of the shortness but intensity of our own lives. Take a bite of something, share a smile with a stranger, warm your face and body under the gentle sun, and breathe it all in slowly. The days last forever here.

There is a wealth of natural beauty on Capri which mingles perfectly with the scattered ruins of Roman Emperor villas and important Greco Roman fragments in museum villas with enviable views in outdoor cafes and winding gardens. Have a lingering lunch of local food on Anacapri (La Rondinella has great vegetable antipasto, salads, seafood, pizzas, pasta, and wine, and is reasonably priced). Stopping at the Villa San Michele museum is wonderful and something I highly recommend. It is one of the places I am happiest in. The Villa was owned by Swedish writer and doctor Axel Munthe and you can see my tour of his gorgeous gardens and Roman marble portico. See the galleries here and here. Don’t leave the garden without looking out to the sea for one of the most beautiful views of the ocean and neighboring islands in muted greens and blues. Not too far away is the Casa Rossa, with a 1st Century Hera statue and four ancient nymph statues from Tiberius‘ swimming cave, the Blue Grotto, where Caligula and Augustus were also purported to have swam.

Next post I’ll be writing about the Greek Revival Villa Lysis and the hike up to the Roman ruins of the Villa Jovis!

La Rondinella restaurant

Via Giuseppe Orlandi 295, 80071 Anacapri, Island of Capri, Italy +39 081 837 1223

Villa San Michele museum

Viale Axel Munthe, 34, 80071 Anacapri NA, Italy

La Casa Rossa museum

– Via Giuseppe Orlandi, 78, 80071 Anacapri NA, Italy

Images shot on Portra 400 analog film and Velvia film slides.

rebecca-starr butler alovelettertorome.com / romepix.com

Rome laid out before you from far far above the rooftops

Image | October 18, 2017 | a love letter to rome and italy!

Take an elevator ride on the “wedding cake” and see the Roman gods’ view of the Eternal City.

The ruins are laid out before you betwixt cupolas and Renaissance rooftops of villas and apartments like dollhouses.

Hints of the past stir some ancient feeling in you you never knew you possessed until you saw Rome from a mount.

The sign of greatness and the sign of a fall and all around you the beautiful noise of life that will not stop long enough to extinguish itself into the remains of dust it lives among.Rome lives among the shadows and the bones and the blood and the ghosts and the stone and the picked away marble because it is the heart and the remnants of the past are the nervous system which still courses with life from that heart center of a slowly dying immortal, entombed in the blessing and the curse of a memory which feels like a dream.

Church bells ring and ring through the city when the golden hour colors everything and there’s time for one last sun-glow walk and one last smile exchanged like kisses on the mouth, not the cheeks.

I will remember you even if the imprint of my self is swallowed up in the city of too many stories and too many lights and too many songs to find a memento mori for me in some nook or cranny when I’m gone.

And so I have Rome written on my soul should I be able to take it with me.

Bury me not in the earth of the place I love but burn my ashes to the sky so I may float like some augur of another time, a shadow to pass over a new face with her own love flashing on her face as she falls in love with the Roman sky at sunset, as she dreams to be remembered somewhere somehow in the eternal city, to leave her mark somewhere and to be known and felt by some future stranger intoxicated by the same love for the same city and the same ringing of bells and the orange becoming purple and the golden lamps flickering on and the smiles becoming kisses, not on the cheeks, but on the mouth.

Italy and England

Image | December 31, 2014June 6, 2016 | a love letter to rome and italy!

There’s old Winston Churchill watching Big Ben, in Westminster, London, in March 2014.

An anglophile’s dream: the omnipresent iconic red telephone box.

Wandering around Portobello Road, in the Notting Hill neighborhood.

The street art / grafitti is like The Sex Pistols and the Bbc all rolled into one.

Tea at Sherlock Holmes and Watson’s house was quite amusing.

Enjoyed searching for british china tea cups and white darjeeling on a half deserted faire.

After wandering the many lovely garden parks of london wound up at Buckingham’s Gate.

Making the pilgrimage to John Keats house at Hampstead Heath, London, after years of visiting the flat he died in, and laying flowers at his grave, in Rome.

A room with a view…over the Thames, I was always excited to wake up to (and to raise my glass to) Big Ben.

Saw the beautiful La Boheme set in 1940s Paris at the Royal Albert Hall.

From the window of “221 b Baker Street, London

From the beautiful garden of John Keats home, where he fell in love with Fanny Brawne and wrote some of his greatest poems.

From the cloisters of Westminster Abbey. I do love a cloister.

You have no idea how deep my anglophilia goes because I am always going on about Italy but these signs gave me a profound joy.

This sign is so British it hurts.

One of those moments in London an American or most foreigners savor.

Always, a pilgrimage, a beauty, a joy. John Keats forever. English Romanticism forever.

Down the cloistered hall… like a dream of English classics, literary characters dancing in my head, London, a city looming in my brain of larger than life characters and eccentric, wonderful stories and frightful tales.

The heartbreakingly beautiful dream of Italy view from my dreamy Sorrento hotel room terrazzo.

Walking along the Appian Way on a quiet, car-free Sunday in Rome or along the Renaissance Via Guilia, I am forever excited and in awe over the small beauties and signs of the ancient world in this magical, mysterious city open-armed to the world.

The architecture and cafes are familiar but I feel and live Rome anew each visit. There’s always something new to discover or a passion to stumble onto. Life is in the moment. It is heavy with the past, it is so alive it smacks of the future, but it is so wildly, lightly felt in the now, in the moment, Rome is like dreaming awake, feeling everything. Everything!

Finding new off the beaten path cafes was a big favorite of mine in Italy this year. Always in search of the quiet moments and the hidden corners of Rome. This cafe was in Trastevere where you can sit and sip espresso and gaze at a Baroque Madonna painted onto a church exterior wall.

I love the Eternal City because it has so many layers of history and love and unknown stories and marks of time and beauty in decay and new life bursting forth in a macabre, colored, brilliant celebration in Roman life today.

Took a boat around my favorite island and swam in the Tyrrhenian sea on Capri, a place which invokes everything beautiful, lush and ancient about Southern Italy. There’s nothing quite like it.

Returned to a lot of the same pleasures of the past, freshly squeezed oranges and lemons, under the Italian sun, by a Neapolitan woman who sings all day as she flitters around her Kiosk on the gorgeous Via Tragara.

A return to Pompeii, the fascinating buried city with Vesuvius watchful in the distance.

Meeting new friends abroad 🙂

Long walks soaking in the sun and the past.

Architectural details in half-obscured gardens of small villa art museums (full of amazing Renaissance, ancient and baroque Italian art)!

Being the foreigner in a city you fall into like a comfortable affair.

The moments you can’t anticipate but happen upon in the most beautiful of happenstances.

My favorite spot on earth for the golden hour, on the Pincian Hill in Rome. This is before the view of the Popolo.

A typical Roman street, wrapped into the mystery of fragments and pieces of history.

The beauty of being overwhelmed in Rome.

Cafe life in Italy, a class of wine or a coffee, a little treat, there is nothing like it. Another layered moment captured, to be savored and remembered palpably.

On every wall there is a reminder of death and a reminder of love, the eternal kind, of love that lasts, and of life in the hand too.

Rome, a city to return to, one that keeps its shutters open to the world, long enough for an unforgettable peek.

Since that first moment I arrived there, now, and always, for Roma.

For traveling, for seeing the world, for meeting new people, and for being at home in the world.

Here’s to 2014… and here is a cheers to 2015 and a new year of adventure and experience and chasing beauty!

musings on rome written to a new friend

Image | February 8, 2014June 7, 2016 | a love letter to rome and italy!

I feel, in Rome, as if I am fully entered into the ancient-ness of the place.
I feel the history in my blood.
I feel almost Italian (with a mix of invading barbarian).

But I tread lightly in Italy.

I try to penetrate the history, the stories, but I tread lightly.
I don’t leave any trace.

I only steal moments.
I steal away people’s feelings in a one second snapshot.

I take more lingering pictures with my eyes.

I really don’t want to be the center of attention, I would rather fade into the background, and let people live around me.

I am greedy for their life spilling out.
Still as much a thief as I was as a child, after all.

This is why I love Naples.

I dread it a little, too.
I want to slap it around occasionally.
I want to remind it of its grit (as if it needs my reminder).
I want to shake it awake to its beauty and history and art.
I want it to not lose its charm, ever.

I don’t even care about the trash that much.
I love the darkest alleys.
I love that life is lived on the streets.
I love that the windows are always open.

I love listening to the strains of a language I cannot decipher because it always sounds like music to me that way.

That’s how I linger in churches so long…
I can’t understand the sermons so I can spend time looking at the art and thinking about pagans all day as if in a dream.

In Italy I am living in the dream and I don’t wake up again until I’m back home in the cold north.

I return to Italy like a lover who cannot stand the separation a moment longer. I want to feel the curves of familiar streets. I want to taste the crushed fruit of summer wine and feel that sun so different from mine. I want to see the stars again against the faint glow of the ruins.

A monastery in the clouds

November 15, 2013June 7, 2016 | a love letter to rome and italy!

One fall afternoon in Naples the clouds snuck out from behind the Pantheon-like San Francesco di Paola Church as I stood in the main square in the sunshine.

Approaching the large, Bourbon Piazza del Plebiscito from the Santa Lucia waterfront district is one of the most dramatic views I’ve ever seen in a city. There is an old monastery on an ancient hill and from this vantage point it looks like the Certosa di San Martino is floating on clouds.

A closer look as you come upon the piazza.

Caffe Gambrinus (Oscar Wilde’s old haunt and one of my favorite cafe-bar-tearooms) and the gleaming dome of the Galleria Umberto I, a strikingly beautiful marble-covered shopping atrium.

All photographs shot in Naples, Italy October 2013 and were shot on velvia 35mm film slides by Rebecca Price Butler alovelettertorome.com retrofocus@mac.com