Florence Travel Forum

Hello:




My husband, 2 sons (11 and 6) and I will be spending a week in Florence in August. After making our plans, some have said that that is too long in Florence and recommended that we take side trips. We very much like shopping and eating and enjoy seeing the sites, but the kids do not have the patience for long museum visits, etc.




What are the side trips that you would recommend? We would either go for the day or possibly stay overnight.




Thank you.

What I did was rent a car, pack the two kids (21 & 270 and the wife in the car and drove to the hill towns, and to Pisa for two days. Always based in Florence tho to spend the night (Hilton). Have fun - Richard

I would recommend a trip to Lucca. You could rent bikes and ride around the walls of the old town. The kids should be able to burn off some energy doing this. I loved it and I'm long past the kid stage. Lucca is a great place to visit and missed by many people.

You can take the kids to the beach in Viareggio. You can take the train there for the day. It will be crowded in August, but a nice relief from the warm city.
Try not to go there on the weekend.

I did that two years ago: to Pisa, staying there until more or less 1pm (you can see the Tower of Pisa and the buildings around) and then to Lucca, going back to Florence in the end of the day.
You can make it by train.

You could visit Siena.

Sienna is a nice place to go. you can get there in about an hour on the train. It has an old medieval centre, a huge square where the pallio horse race is staged every year and if your kids are energetic they can climb to the top of the tower in the square for a birds eye view of the city. There are also some nice restaurants to sit out on and people watch.

As mentioned above, Siena is very nice too, but it has a "con": the train station is about 2km far from the "beggining" of the city center (Piazza Matteotti), so you'd have to take the local bus to city center (from the station) or (what I did) to take the bus directly from Florence to Siena (the bus terminal stop in Florence is close to the train station).
Since you'll stay one week in Florence, maybe you could do both day trips: Pisa-Lucca and Siena (I did both, and I loved all these cities, as well as Florence).