Samantha Brown Reveals The Most Overrated Destination In Any Big Italian City And Where To Go Instead

Visitors to Italy know that there are plenty of things that the country doesn't lack — like cappuccinos, hand gestures, stunningly deep and varied local customs, and (not to be confused with pizzas) piazzas. It's not an exaggeration to say that every single Italian city you'd think to visit — Florence, Siena, Milan, Venice, wherever — is built around an old, central, downtown piazza (or plaza). Centers of commerce and social life deriving from ancient Rome, and similar to Greek agorae, piazzas once served a vital everyday role in Italian cities that's now long overshadowed by their current function as tourist hubs. This is exactly why travel expert Samantha Brown says they're overrated.

Basically, it's like this: When you visit any Italian city, you do the walk into the doubtlessly gorgeous piazza, gawk a bit, spin around 360 degrees, snap some photos, and then, most pointedly, leave. You definitely don't sit down and pay "$10 for a crappy cappuccino" at a café where you can't even use the bathroom, as Brown writes. Piazzas are "a mob scene," she says. Rather, much like any other city center, you stroll out a brief 10 minutes, find something less congested, more chill, and a lot more authentic.

Nonetheless, it's important to remember Brown's extensive traveling experience. Someone who's never laid eyes on an Italian piazza will all but certainly find any of them magical. And, that same person will think quite differently after their 500th piazza — when all the beige walls, clock towers, and clutter of slowly strolling human bodies blends together into a soup of exhaustion and annoyance. So visit and leave — and have a seat (and a coffee) far away from the piazza instead.

While Samantha Brown's advice to not linger in piazzas is applicable to any and all tourist-packed downtowns the world over, it's especially true in Italy. In 2023, Italy welcomed 57.3 million visitors. Slightly down from the pre-coronavirus days of 64.5 million visitors in 2019, Italy still consistently ranks as one of the world's most-visited tourist destinations. And all those tourists flood into piazzas that were never designed for such volume. Then, they not only hang around, but also commit the heinous faux pas of sitting on or eating at fountains and statues.

So, why not do what Brown suggests and get away from all such commotion and disreputable behavior for a seat and a beverage? Venturing into the narrow streets around a piazza like Siena's Piazza del Campo, for example, reveals loads of breathable cafés that aren't within direct eyeshot of the square. All Italian cities are constructed like this, where you can switchback along one, two, or three adjacent streets, further and further out, each one getting less cluttered, until you hit the next tourist attraction. This is true even of Florence's more grid-like design, where cafés pop up along the path away from its central piazza, Piazza della Signoria. 

Then again, because this is tourist-saturated Italy, you might have a hard time finding breathability even further outside of piazzas. But not to worry, because the country is replete with tiny, overlooked towns worthy of attention — like Comacchio, also known as "Little Venice," near the Mediterranean coast east of Bologna. That's just one example of a stop you can use to transform your trip to Italy into something uniquely yours — at least once you've snapped your piazza pictures.