Car hire in Italy will be essential if you are on vacation in Italy, unless you are booked into a hotel for the duration of your holiday. Distances between points and cities of interest can be large, and while flying or buses are one option, the former can be expensive and the buses can take a long time to reach your destination.

That is the major reason for car hire in Italy being so important to people on holiday with limited schedules. Unlike other countries, except perhaps for Greece where the historical, art and cultural highlights tend to be located over a fairly small area, in Italy you may want to visit the uniqueness of the city of Venice in the north, the capital and ancient city of Rome in the middle and Mount Etna down in the South close to Sicily.

Italy also has the fashion houses of Milan and the artistic genius of Florence to attract you, and without a car you would not only be very restricted in traveling times, but would also need a huge budget to cover your traveling expenses using public transport. Car hire in Italy, on the other hand, is inexpensive in comparison and the need for car hire in this country is specific to Italy, and not comparable to any other.

Hiring a car in the USA, for example, is only useful for relatively local travel because the country is so vast and car hire is not a viable option for tourists. The same is true of the UK which is significantly smaller than Italy, but whose roads tend to be busier and slower running, while British trains and air travel are fairly inexpensive for the short distances involved. In Italy, the autostrade is the fifth-largest motorway network in the world with a speed limit of 81 MPH, 11 higher than the 70 in the UK.

These are just a few of the reasons why car hire in Italy is recommended for visitors to the country that want to visit as many attractions as they possibly can in the time available to them. Rail travel in Italy is also advanced, but by driving yourself you will be able to see a lot more along the way. Here is quick route from Venice in the north to Sicily in the south.

Venice is a beautiful city and a great place to hire your car. You can collect anything from a Ford Fiesta to a Mercedes SLK at Venice Airport, then spend two or three days in the beautiful canal city. Your car hire in Italy should be booked for the time it takes you to reach your departure airport.

Many people start in Venice and end up at Naples airport where they drop it off, but if you want to visit both Milan and Venice, fly to Milan first then drive to Venice. From there drive all the way down to Sicily and leave from Palermo Airport. A total of not far off 1,000 miles, but you can do this over a 7 or 10 day vacation: 100 - 145 miles/day which is not a great deal.

Make sure that your car hire in Italy has no mileage limit - you don't want to pay per mile here, because that could restrict your plans. For example, Venice - Milan - Florence is a total of 356 miles while Milan - Venice - Florence is 329 miles by road. So you save 27 miles if you fly to Milan airport and hire your car there.

Milan offers the best fashion in the world, and Florence some of the best art you will ever see in addition to its fabulous Chianti. You just have at least one glass here! From Florence drive down the 173 miles to Rome, and you could stop at Perugia and visit its art galleries and museums, or simply try its world-famous chocolate. MMmmm…divine! This is where you will be glad of your car hire in Italy, because From Perugia you can head off for Rome (119 miles) and all the wonderful things that this historic city has to offer, among them the wonderfully dry Frascati wine.

From Rome it's only 136 miles to romantic Naples where you can enjoy a candlelit dinner and a bottle of fine Lacryma Christi del Vesuvio, the fabulous wine fermented from the grapes grown on the terraced slopes of Mount Vesuvius - which leads us to the volcano and the remains of Pompeii that nobody driving to this region should miss This makes car hire in Italy worthwhile, just to visit this volcano and the three towns it destroyed. The others were Herculaneum as well as Stabiae and Oplontis that few know about.

From Naples, you then drive south to the Strait of Messina and cross to Messina in Sicily. Climb the active volcano Etna, enjoy some beautiful Marsala wine, and then head for Palermo from where you can fly to Rome, Milan or back to Venice after dropping off your car. Alternatively, you can fly to a number of European destination including the UK (Gatwick), and from there back to the USA or any other world destination. You can get from Gatwick to Heathrow by helicopter or the Heathrow Express bus service.

In order to see as much of Italy as possible on your vacation, car hire in Italy will enable you to use the route above or its reverse. You can visit Italy without hiring a car, although the trains and buses can be a pain if you have to lug all your luggage around with you, and you will not have half as much fun as car hire, where you can stop off wherever looks good.