Honest Review of Campervanning Italy
We wanted to give an honest review of how it went campervanning in Italy for 3 weeks. Would we do it again? Maybe not. Would we recommend doing it once? Oh yeah! We are so glad that’s how we explored Italy but as you know, you always learn new things when you travel.
Originally, we wanted to explore the vast majority of Europe by train. That was the first “sketch” we made of this trip. However, when we got to planning it that way, we decided that carrying our backpacks everywhere throughout the cities wouldn’t be that fun. So we did some digging into renting a campervan and discovered it was quite affordable. I mean we could have privacy, a free bathroom (because no public restroom is free in Italy), cook meals, leave our belongings behind, and drive wherever we wanted. Sounds fabulous! Continue reading to hear our honest review of how it went and what we would do differently if we went back!
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You can Travel Everywhere Without Restraint (mostly)
We like to wing our vacations. I’d like to admit that sometimes this drives me crazy but then I remember that it allows us the freedom to enjoy our vacation without feeling forced to do things on days we don’t want to just because we paid for them. Renting the campervan gave us the freedom to spend more or less time in certain places pending on how we felt about them. I mean don’t get me wrong, we loved the beautiful city buildings and architecture but walking through ample amounts of people was mentally draining. So when we got sick of a city, we left and moved on to the next place on our list. We had a general idea of locations and what route we would be traveling but we booked all our tours and campsites a few days in advance (we wouldn’t recommend doing this if you are traveling during the busy season, we traveled late October + early November without issue of booking things we wanted). The only downside to driving the campervan was taking it into the cities was just terrible. Our van was 2-3 times the size of any vehicle in the city, especially considering most people drive Vespas and scooters. The traffic is unorganized and chaotic, and you certainly will not find a place to park what seems like a limousine to the vehicles they drive. So we did end up camping outside of the cities and taking public transportation in. Public transportation was so incredibly cheap that it made it worth it. You didn’t have to stress drive into the city and all you had to do is follow a bus schedule. Easy! But as you may know, public transportation isn’t ALWAYS reliable as things break down and become out of service for extended periods of time. This happened to us only a couple of times when we had to pay a lot for an Uber ride back to our camper.
You can Make your Trip Cost Effective (& sometimes not)
When planning the overall cost of this trip, we figured we would be under our budget because campsites were really cheap (especially with it being the off-season), we could cook a lot of our meals, and we wouldn’t be driving every single day so the cost of gas would be less. This wasn’t necessarily the case. Sure, we saved a ton of money compared to taking Ubers everywhere, paying for hotel rooms, and going out to eat for every meal but in the long run, things just added up like they do on any vacation. There are toll road fees (A LOT OF THEM), gas prices leave much to be desired, and why in the world do we have to pay to use a public toilet? Do they realize how many times one has to use the bathroom during the day when they are trying to stay hydrated while walking all over the city? Not to mention all the coffee and espressos they lure you into drinking…There are many ways to avoid some of these unexpected costs but adding 4 hours to your drive to avoid a $15 toll road doesn’t make sense when the cost of gas was nearly $6 a gallon. On the plus side, we were able to use an app on our phones that helped us find free campsites for some of the nights in between our stays. This allowed us to save money during travel as we didn’t need to be hooked up to electricity every single night. That’s the bonus of having a campervan is we had a bathroom, hot water, a place to sleep, and a way to cook food even without having to pay a campground fee. And most of the free campsites were located in the parking lots of grocery stores so it was nice to have food right next door.
You Risk Possibly Being Stuck on the Side of the Road
Fortunately, this never happened to us. However, we were unable to use the heat in our van for most of our stay due to the gas tank leaking and we refused to hinder our trip to drive all the way back to Milan to get it fixed not knowing how long we would have wasted trip time. There were nights (especially in the mountains) when it was quite frigid but running the heat in our van overnight could have been dangerous to our health. There was a gas leak somewhere when we turned on the heat and it would stink up the whole van. Thankfully we were still able to use the gas for the stove for cooking but we would just have to ventilate the van and make sure it was fully closed before leaving. This was a major downside primarily because of the season we were in (Oct/Nov). It didn’t stay very warm when the sun went down so we ended up sleeping many nights with layers and hats on.
You Learn a Lot About Traveling
We met some really cool people at the campgrounds whether it be fellow campervanners or the hosts of the campgrounds we stayed at. Never be afraid to ask questions or seek suggestions for travel because most people in these places want to share that with you. We found out about tours, sites to see, and food to eat from many other travelers along the way. And when you’re forced to learn the way of Italy without much preparation, you end up taking in a lot more than you anticipated. You learn things like: You probably won’t be able to get groceries or restaurant food between 12 PM-3 PM because Italians take long lunch breaks and they take them seriously. Getting gas is more complicated if you aren’t using a debit card, specifically if you can’t read Italian. You have to be confident, especially when waiting in line somewhere because Italians wait for nobody, and if you aren’t ready to go, you will become second in line again and again. Italians are passionate talkers and it kind of freaked me out a little at times because I couldn’t register if it was anger or just simply typical body language. When eating at a restaurant, they never rush you out of the restaurant. You have to ask for your bill and/or pay at the counter when you are ready (and we were always done eating much faster than everyone else here, must be the American way to eat fast…).
Key Takeaways
Should we campervan it if we are traveling to Italy for the first time? If you’re adventurous and are okay with plans changing, then yes. If you’re a strict planner, I would recommend maybe not doing so.
Should we budget higher for gas and toll roads? Yeah probably because they ended up being way more in the long run.
Should we book all our tours way in advance? It depends on the time of year you are visiting. If you’re there in the summer months, you definitely need to book tours in advance. If you’re there in the fall, you’ll mostly be able to book everything 1-3 days in advance as we did.
Should we plan out all our campsites in advance? We didn’t have to while traveling in Oct/Nov and only got burned one night out of 19 nights but in the busy months, I’m sure campgrounds fill up much quicker and are harder to come by.
Do we need Euros? Definitely don’t bring American dollars. We mostly used our credit cards and we got euros out of an ATM in Italy just to have them on hand because some small restaurants and a lot of the campgrounds don’t take credit cards and only take euros. We found that the ATM had the least expensive “exchange rate” for getting euros so this is the route we took but we’d recommend checking with your bank on their international fee policies.
If we went back to Europe, would we campervan again? Probably not. Now that we know the lay of the land, I think we would likely rent a car or take a train everywhere and bop around from BNB to BNB. But we would definitely recommend it for the adventurous type that hasn’t been there before!
