Tailormade tour Three majestic art cities of northern Italy: Bologna, Ravenna and Padua Italy

We include flights from London Heathrow to Bologna with British Airways but can offer you flights with other airlines, such as Easyjet, if more suitable for you. Upon arrival in Bologna, you are met by the driver and private car for the transfer to the hotel. The drive from the airport to the city centre takes about 15 minutes usually. Check in to the hotel and start to explore the city.

There are two full days in Bologna. It’s worth starting at the Piazza Maggiore and exploring outwards from here. Bologna rewards the traveller who looks beyond the obvious to discover one of Italy's most beguiling and authentically Italian cities. Often overlooked in favour of its more celebrated neighbours, Bologna is a city of formidable substance — intellectually, architecturally and gastronomically — and those who make the journey are rarely anything other than captivated. Bologna's historic centre is one of the best-preserved medieval townscapes in all of Italy. Its famous portici — the forty kilometres of arcaded walkways that thread through the city — are listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and it is beneath these elegant colonnades that the true rhythm of Bolognese life is lived. The two leaning towers, the Asinelli and the Garisenda, soar above the terracotta rooflines of the centro storico, and the climb to the top of the taller Asinelli is rewarded with a panoramic view across the city and out towards the Apennine foothills that frame it to the south. The Piazza Maggiore is among the grandest civic squares in Italy, flanked by the vast unfinished façade of the Basilica di San Petronio — which would, had its ambitious original plans been realised, have surpassed St Peter's in Rome — and the magnificent Neptune fountain by Giambologna. The National Art Gallery of Bologna houses an outstanding collection of works by Giotto, Raphael, Titian and Guercino, while the university quarter, home to the oldest university in the Western world, lends the city a wonderfully lively intellectual energy quite unlike anything found in more touristy Italian destinations. Highlights must include the Basilica di San Petronio, the two towers (Due Torri), the National Picture Gallery (Pinacoteca Nazionale), the Archiginnasio and its remarkable anatomical theatre, the Sanctuary of San Luca and its extraordinary connecting portico, the Museo Civico Medievale, the Basilica di Santo Stefano with its evocative complex of seven interconnected churches. Bologna's culinary reputation is the finest in Italy — no small claim in a country where food is taken as seriously as it is here. Known simply as La Grassa (the fat one), Bologna gave the world ragù alla bolognese, mortadella, tortellini and tagliatelle, and the city's covered market, the Quadrilatero, is an unrivalled theatre of exceptional produce: aged Parmigiano-Reggiano, prosciutto di Parma, handmade pasta, truffle oils and some of the finest Sangiovese-based wines of the region. 

There are several direct regional trains a day from Bologna to Ravenna. The journey time is about one hour and twelve minutes. The regional train is only one class and does stop at several places in between. We suggest you ask the hotel to call a taxi for you for the short ride to Bologna central station and upon arrival in Ravenna, it is a walk of only about 10 minutes from the station to the hotel but you may want to take a taxi, depending on how much luggage you have. Check-in to the hotel and start to explore the locality.

You have two full days in Ravenna. It could be done in one full day (two nights) but without visiting the Mausoleum of Theodorico and Sant’Apollinare in Classe.

Ravenna offers one of the most profoundly rewarding cultural experiences in all of Italy — and, indeed, in the whole of Europe. This is a city that wears its extraordinary history with a quiet confidence, its modest streets and intimate piazzas concealing an artistic inheritance of almost incomprehensible richness. Ravenna was, successively, the capital of the Western Roman Empire, the seat of the Ostrogothic Kingdom and the western stronghold of the Byzantine Empire, and the legacy of those remarkable centuries of power is preserved in a collection of early Christian and Byzantine mosaics that are, quite simply, without parallel anywhere in the world.

Eight of Ravenna's monuments are listed collectively as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and it requires several days to do them justice properly. The mosaics of the Basilica di San Vitale, the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia, the Basilica di Sant'Apollinare Nuovo and the Battistero degli Ariani are not merely works of religious art — they are among the supreme achievements of human civilisation. To stand before the shimmering gold and lapis of the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia, the oldest of the UNESCO monuments, is an experience that remains with the visitor long after they have returned home. The quality of light within these buildings is unlike anything produced by any other art form, and the expert traveller who has visited Florence, Rome and Venice will find Ravenna a revelation of an entirely different order. We include a ticket that is valid for five main sites, some to be visited at a strict time, others over the duration of the stay in Ravenna.

The city itself is delightfully manageable and almost entirely free from the over-tourism that can diminish the experience of Italy's more celebrated destinations. The centro storico invites leisurely exploration on foot or by bicycle — Ravenna is a city of cyclists — and the streets between the principal monuments are lined with excellent restaurants, independent wine bars and food shops stocked with the outstanding produce of Emilia-Romagna. Cultural highlights are the Basilica di San Vitale and the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia (the most celebrated of the UNESCO sites), the Basilica di Sant'Apollinare Nuovo, the Battistero Neoniano, the Battistero degli Ariani, the Archbishop's Chapel and Museum (Museo Arcivescovile), the Mausoleum of Theodoric, the Basilica di Sant'Apollinare in Classe (set among the pineta outside the city and well worth the short journey, reached by train or taxi), and the Dante Museum — for Ravenna is also the final resting place of the great poet, who died here in 1321 and whose tomb is tended with great civic pride. Ravenna is in Emilia-Romagna, Italy's most celebrated culinary region, and benefits handsomely from that provenance. The city's restaurants draw on an outstanding larder: handmade pasta in all its regional variations, aged Parmigiano-Reggiano, locally cured meats, fresh fish and shellfish from the nearby Adriatic, and the robust, characterful wines of the Romagna hills — Sangiovese di Romagna chief among them. The covered market in the centre of the city is an excellent place to begin any gastronomic exploration, and the surrounding trattorias offer the kind of honest, ingredient-led cooking that is becoming increasingly rare elsewhere in Italy. The Ravenna Festival, held each summer from towards the end of May to mid-July, is among the most distinguished music festivals in Italy, attracting internationally celebrated conductors, orchestras and opera companies to perform in venues of extraordinary beauty — including the basilicas themselves. For the music-lover, timing a visit to coincide with the festival adds an incomparable dimension to the experience. Advance planning is essential, as both performances and hotel accommodation fill rapidly during the festival period.

Make your own way back to the railway station. There is a train at about 11.40 which arrives in Padua about 14.00 hrs with a change in Ferrara of about 30 minutes.

You have two full days to explore Padua. It’s worth dividing into central and northern areas and then visiting the southern sites on a different occasion.

Padua brings the discerning traveller to one of the most intellectually and artistically significant cities in Italy — and yet one that remains, quite remarkably, largely undiscovered by the mainstream tourist circuit. Padua is a city of genuine depth: ancient, learned, fiercely independent in character and possessed of a cultural inheritance that, at its pinnacle, represents one of the most important single moments in the history of Western art. That it sits in the shadow of Venice, less than forty minutes away by train, has long worked to its advantage — for Padua has been left largely to itself, and the experience of visiting it is correspondingly more authentic and more rewarding than many better-known Italian destinations.

The Cappella degli Scrovegni is the reason alone that the journey to Padua is not merely worthwhile but essential for any serious lover of art. Giotto's cycle of frescoes, completed around 1305 and covering every surface of this small, luminous chapel, is among the supreme masterpieces of European civilisation — the moment at which Western painting turned irrevocably towards naturalism, emotion and the human figure. Viewing the frescoes is a carefully managed and deeply moving experience: numbers are strictly limited, visits are timed and brief, and the chapel is kept at a controlled temperature and humidity that heightens the sense of entering somewhere truly precious. No reproduction does justice to the quality of the original, and those who have seen the Scrovegni will understand immediately why it ranks among the great artistic pilgrimages. We recommend that we book a visit here for you for early in the morning of your first full day in the city.

Yet Padua offers considerably more than the Scrovegni alone. The Basilica di Sant'Antonio — known simply to Italians as Il Santo — is one of the great pilgrimage churches of Christendom and one of the most architecturally extraordinary buildings in northern Italy, its domed silhouette a landmark visible from across the city. The Palazzo della Ragione, with its magnificent medieval great hall, the vast and lovely Prato della Valle — one of the largest squares in Europe — the Oratorio di San Giorgio and the Scuola del Santo with their Titian frescoes, and the remarkable Baptistery of the Cathedral with its own outstanding fresco cycle by Giusto de' Menabuoi all demand and reward careful attention.

Padua's university, founded in 1222 and the second oldest in Italy after Bologna, gave the world Galileo among its faculty and retains a palpable sense of scholarly tradition in its ancient lecture halls and the extraordinary anatomical theatre — the oldest surviving example in the world — where the study of human anatomy was conducted with a rigour and openness that was revolutionary for its time. The Orto Botanico, established in 1545 and also a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is the oldest university botanical garden in the world and remains a place of great beauty and scientific interest.

Cultural highlights include the Cappella degli Scrovegni (advance booking is essential and we include this for you – suggesting that you do this visit early in the morning of your first full day), the Basilica di Sant'Antonio and its Treasury, the Palazzo della Ragione, the Baptistery of the Cathedral, the Oratorio di San Giorgio and Scuola del Santo, the Orto Botanico (UNESCO listed), the Palazzo Zuckermann, the Museo Civico agli Eremitani, and the university's anatomical theatre (Teatro Anatomico).

Padua sits within the Veneto and draws on one of Italy's most varied and accomplished culinary traditions. The city's markets — particularly the wonderful daily market beneath the Palazzo della Ragione — are among the finest in the region, stacked with white asparagus from Bassano del Grappa, radicchio from Treviso, fresh truffles in season, superb cheeses and the outstanding fish and shellfish of the Adriatic. The wines of the Colli Euganei, the gentle volcanic hills immediately to the south and west of the city, are produced in relative obscurity but offer excellent quality and are well worth exploring with the guidance of a knowledgeable local. The restaurants of central Padua, away from the immediate vicinity of the Scrovegni, are largely frequented by locals and university staff and offer the kind of confident, unfussy regional cooking that reflects the city's character admirably. The city also hosts a well-regarded antiques market on the third Sunday of each month in the Prato della Valle — one of the largest antiques markets in Italy — which is well worth timing a visit to coincide with.

A private car and driver will take you from the hotel in Padua to Venice Marco Polo airport in good time for your flight home.