"Italy is a country of villages" Italy by Beausoleil

After you've visited Rome, Florence, Milan and Venice, explore the rest of Italy. It is a large and diverse country. You have the Alps, beautiful lakes, the wild coastline of Cinque Terre and Amalfi and the pristine Adriatic Sea on the east. Sicily is a sunburned beauty while Tuscany and Umbria are full of beautiful hill villages and spectacular scenery.

Where to start? Tough choice. First let me state I am not a travel expert on Italy. We just enjoy traveling a bit off the beaten track. I highly recommend you check Travel Pages on these towns by typing their names into the VT Search Window and seeing what your fellow members have to say about them.

Our first trip to Italy was a week in Rome and we enjoyed it but we wanted to see something besides busy city streets.

Our next trip took us into Tuscany where we rented an apartment in a farmhouse. In Italy farm stays are called Agriturismo and these are required to be working farms. A great many of them are olive groves or vineyards so very beautiful. The advantage (besides the local scenery) is that you get to meet the owners and shop in the local markets. It's a little piece of Italian life and it's all yours.

Assisi from a distance

Many!

There are Abruzzo, Basilicata, Calabria, Campania, Emilia-Romagna, Friuili-Venezia Guilia, Lazio, Liguria, Lombardia, Marche, Molise, Piemonte, Publia, Sardegna (an island), Sicilia (an island), Toscana, Trentino-Alto Adige, Umbria, Valle d'Aosta and finally Veneto.

Consider most people only visit Lazio (Rome), Toscano (Cinque Terre, Florence, Siena in what we call Tuscany), Campania (Naples and the Amalfi Coast) and Veneto (Venice). That leaves a lot of Italy to explore.

Several books and movies about Tuscany have made it very popular but it's also popular because it is so beautiful. It has also gotten a lot more expensive and you can get the same beauty by moving into Umbria. You have perched villages, rolling countryside, Italian cypress, olive groves and vineyards galore with slightly lower prices.

Virtual Tourist has recently changed from a regional format to listing towns and cities alphabetically. That's fine if you know where the places are . . . or know what cities are in the region. If you need more information, you can easily check Google Maps for names of towns and cities in a region. http://maps.google.com/

Or you can do various searches using names of towns and cities you know and then getting links to other places. Here's a little list to help you get started.

Tuscany, check Florence, Siena, Greve, San Gimignano, Montalcino, Fiesole, Lucca, Arezzo. For Umbria, check Perugia, Assisi, Montepulciano, Abbadia, Todi and Spoleto. Genoa is in Liguria. Bologna is in Emilia-Romagna. Campania holds Naples, the Amalfi Coast, Salerno, Pompeii, Positano, Sorrento. Venice is in Veneto; Turin in Lombardia and Turin is in Piemonte. These are the main tourist spots and will give you links to other places in those areas. Happy Hunting!

View from above our apartment near Maratea

There is the Maratea Coast in the region known as Basilicata south of the more famous Amalfi Coast. It is incredibly beautiful and there are tourists there too but most of them are Italian tourists. It does help to speak a modest amount of Italian when you visit here. If you stay at a resort, there will be English-speaking staff, but if you choose to stay in the countryside, you may be on your own. If you need English, check agriturismo web sites carefully, perhaps only looking for the ones that have an English option.

I highly recommend Rosetta Stone as a language learning program. Over a period of a month or two, you can easily pick up enough Italian to make your trip a lot more fun. You can't talk to the local residents unless you speak their language . . . makes sense.

• Pros:Beautiful scenery, great food, friendly people
• Cons:A bit of Italian vocabulary helps in the countryside
• In a nutshell:It's fun to explore all of a country, not just the big cities and tourist attractions.