Hamilton & Chase Tours
South of Italy — Private Package 9-day Italy tour: Rome, Puglia, Matera, Sorrento & Amalfi

9-Day Private Package Journey

South of Italy

Rome, Puglia, Matera, Sorrento & Amalfi

Available as Private Semi-Private Self-Guided
From €4,560 per person 9 days / 8 nights
View Itinerary

Tour Overview

9 days across Italy.

Southern Italy is the Italy that the famous-cities itinerary doesn't show you: older, rawer, more surprising, and in many ways more beautiful. This nine-day private journey begins in Rome, then goes south into territory most visitors never reach — Puglia's white-stoned coastal towns and the Adriatic, Matera's cave city carved into the ravine of a Lucanian gorge and inhabited without interruption for nine thousand years, and then the Amalfi Coast where the limestone cliffs drop into the Tyrrhenian Sea and the word 'beautiful' becomes inadequate. Capri provides the island finale. Every guide is a specialist in their region, every hotel chosen for position and character, and the south reveals itself as the part of Italy that stays with you longest after you've left.

Detailed Itinerary

Your journey, day by day.

Every day is designed with breathing room. Sleep in, take a detour, linger at lunch — the itinerary flexes around you, not the other way around.

Day 1 — Arrival in Rome
Day 1
1

Day 1

Arrival in Rome

The city where South Italy's story ultimately leads back to.

Your private driver meets you at Rome Fiumicino Airport and transfers you to your hotel in the historic centre — the gateway to the south and still the city against whose scale everything else in Italy is measured. After settling in, the afternoon is yours: the Pantheon, the Trevi Fountain, Piazza Navona, and the Trastevere neighbourhood whose medieval streets run parallel to the tourist circuit and are substantially better for dining. For your first evening, we'll share our favourite Roman trattorias nearby — the kind of places where cacio e pepe and supplì are served with a carafe of something local and zero fuss.

  • Private airport transfer into Rome
  • Pantheon, Trevi Fountain, Piazza Navona at leisure
  • Curated dining recommendations in Trastevere and Centro Storico
4–5★ centrally located hotel, Rome historic centre
Day 2 — Rome Highlights
Day 2
2

Day 2

Rome Highlights

Ancient empire, baroque church, the city that built the Western world.

Your guide meets you after breakfast for a morning in Rome's most essential spaces: the Roman Forum and Palatine Hill — the outdoor museum of the ancient city, where temple foundations and triumphal arches stand in the open air and your guide fills in the life that surrounded them. The Colosseum follows with skip-the-line private access, your archaeologist explaining the engineering, the spectacle, and the fifty thousand spectators who filled these tiers for events that lasted a hundred days. The afternoon crosses to Vatican City: the Vatican Museums, the Raphael Rooms whose ceiling frescoes would be the highlight of any other building, and the Sistine Chapel where Michelangelo's ceiling and Last Judgement face each other across the most famous chapel in the world.

  • Roman Forum, Palatine Hill, and Colosseum
  • Vatican Museums and Raphael Rooms
  • Sistine Chapel and St. Peter's Basilica
  • Rome historic centre at leisure
Meals: Breakfast 4–5★ centrally located hotel, Rome historic centre
Day 3 — Rome to Bari
Day 3
3

Day 3

Rome to Bari

South to the Adriatic and the heel of the boot.

After breakfast, the Frecciarossa south from Roma Termini to Bari — four hours across the Apennines and down the Adriatic coast, the landscape becoming more southern with every kilometre: dryer, flatter, more ancient-feeling. Bari is the capital of Puglia and the gateway to the south's south: a city of two halves, the modern grid built by the Bourbons and the medieval Bari Vecchia, a labyrinth of whitewashed lanes above the Adriatic where the old women still make fresh orecchiette pasta on the street outside their front doors. Your guide leads you through the old town in the afternoon — past the Basilica of Saint Nicholas, built to house the bones of the saint stolen from Myra in 1087 and now one of the most important pilgrimage sites in the Christian world — and along the seafront promenade where the aperitivo hour begins at six and the families walk in a ritual unchanged for generations.

  • High-speed train Rome–Bari through the Apennines
  • Bari Vecchia whitewashed medieval lanes
  • Basilica of Saint Nicholas
  • Bari seafront promenade at aperitivo hour
Meals: Breakfast 4–5★ centrally located hotel, Bari
Day 4 — Puglia Coastal Towns
Day 4
4

Day 4

Puglia Coastal Towns

Whitewash, trulli, and the Adriatic on both sides.

Puglia's coast and interior are among the least-visited parts of Italy and among the most beautiful. Your private driver takes you south along the Adriatic into the Valle d'Itria — the inland plateau of Puglia where the trulli appear: the dry-stone conical houses built without mortar by farmers who needed to be able to dismantle and reassemble them quickly to avoid property taxes. Alberobello, the UNESCO-listed trulli village, is the most concentrated example, its hillside covered in hundreds of the pointed white structures. Locorotondo and Ostuni follow — hill towns above the plain whose whitewash and limestone are bleached to a near-Mediterranean brightness. A lunch of orecchiette with cime di rapa, fava bean puree, and local Primitivo wine captures the essence of Puglian cooking in a single table. Return to Bari in the evening.

  • Alberobello UNESCO trulli village
  • Locorotondo and Ostuni whitewashed hill towns
  • Puglian countryside and Valle d'Itria
  • Orecchiette lunch with local Primitivo wine
Meals: Breakfast 4–5★ centrally located hotel, Bari
Day 5 — Bari to Matera
Day 5
5

Day 5

Bari to Matera

The cave city — nine thousand years of continuous habitation.

An hour's drive southwest from Bari brings you to one of the most extraordinary places in Italy — in Europe, arguably. Matera's Sassi districts are carved directly into the sides of a deep ravine: cave dwellings, cave churches, and an entire cave neighbourhood that was inhabited without interruption from the Palaeolithic era until the Italian government forcibly evacuated the residents in the 1950s on the grounds that the conditions were a national disgrace. Today, the same caves are a UNESCO World Heritage Site, a Capital of Culture, and home to some of the finest boutique hotels in southern Italy — including, if you choose it, a cave hotel where your room has been carved from the same rock people lived in nine thousand years ago. Your guide walks you through both Sassi districts — the Sasso Caveoso and the Sasso Barisano — into the rock-cut churches whose Byzantine frescoes still cover the cave walls, and to the viewpoints where the full scale of the ravine becomes apparent. Matera at dusk, when the caves glow golden, is one of the most dramatic sights in the country.

  • Matera Sassi districts — UNESCO World Heritage
  • Rock-cut churches with Byzantine frescoes
  • Gravina gorge viewpoints
  • Matera at dusk — the golden cave city
Meals: Breakfast 4–5★ cave hotel or boutique hotel, Matera
Day 6 — Matera to Sorrento
Day 6
6

Day 6

Matera to Sorrento

From the ancient south to the beautiful coast.

A final morning in Matera — the dawn light on the Sassi is worth setting an alarm for — before the road west through the Basilicata hills and across the instep of the Italian boot to the Campanian coast. Sorrento appears on its clifftop above the Bay of Naples with the volcano smoking distantly on the horizon: a town of lemon groves, inlaid wood workshops, and a main street lined with limoncello shops that have been extracting the local citrus for generations. Check into your hotel — sea-view rooms available above the bay — and spend the afternoon at leisure: the old town's lanes, the port below where the ferries leave for Capri, or simply a terrace chair with a glass of white and the bay going through its colours in the late afternoon light.

  • Final Matera morning — dawn light on the Sassi
  • Scenic drive through Basilicata to Campania
  • Sorrento clifftop arrival above the Bay of Naples
  • Bay of Naples views at sunset
Meals: Breakfast 4–5★ hotel with sea views, Sorrento
Day 7 — Capri Island
Day 7
7

Day 7

Capri Island

The island that the emperors chose — and everyone since.

The ferry from Sorrento to Capri takes forty minutes — the island growing from a blue silhouette to a mass of white limestone cliffs and Mediterranean vegetation as you cross the bay. Capri has been a retreat for the powerful and the beautiful since Augustus built his villas here in the first century BC, and it has never lost the habit. Your guide meets you at the port and takes the chairlift to Anacapri — the upper town, quieter and more residential — before descending through the town's spectacular garden paths and white lanes to the Blue Grotto, the sea cave whose underwater entrance creates a chamber of extraordinarily luminescent blue light, the colour produced by sunlight refracted through the water below the entrance and reflected off the cave floor. The afternoon is leisure on the island: the terrace restaurants, the luxury boutiques, the Augustus Gardens with their view of the Faraglioni rocks standing in the sea. The ferry returns you to Sorrento in the evening.

  • Ferry crossing to Capri
  • Anacapri and the island's upper quarter
  • Blue Grotto sea cave
  • Augustus Gardens and Faraglioni rock views
Meals: Breakfast 4–5★ hotel with sea views, Sorrento
Day 8 — Amalfi Coast Scenic Drive
Day 8
8

Day 8

Amalfi Coast Scenic Drive

The most beautiful road in Europe — taken slowly.

The SS163 Amalfitana is not a road so much as a decision by engineers to follow the coast regardless of what the coast was doing, which in this case meant cutting a single-lane path into vertical limestone cliffs above the Tyrrhenian Sea for fifty kilometres. Your private driver takes it at the pace the road demands — slowly, with stops — working east from Sorrento through the towns that have given this coast its reputation. Positano first: pastel-coloured buildings spilling down a ravine to a pebble beach, its lanes so steep that the local transport is either donkey or step. Amalfi itself was a maritime republic of genuine power in the ninth and tenth centuries — its nautical tables set the standard for Mediterranean navigation — and the Duomo's facade, part Romanesque, part Arab-Norman, faces the sea as if prepared for inspection. Ravello is the final stop: a hilltop village whose Villa Cimbrone gardens drop to an 'infinity terrace' above the sea where Greta Garbo famously hid from the world in 1938, and whose Villa Rufolo hosted Wagner when he was finishing Parsifal. The coast in both directions from the terrace is as beautiful as advertised.

  • Positano — painted village above the sea
  • Amalfi town and its maritime republic Duomo
  • Ravello's Villa Cimbrone terrace
  • Amalfitana coastal road scenic drive
Meals: Breakfast 4–5★ hotel with sea views, Sorrento
Day 9 — Departure
Day 9
9

Day 9

Departure

The south stays with you — in the cave smell, the sea colour, the wine.

Your last southern morning: a final breakfast above the Bay of Naples, a limoncello from the bar at the end of the street, perhaps a last walk to the Sorrento harbour where the ferries run and the fishing boats come back in. At the agreed time, your private driver transfers you to Naples International Airport for your departure — or to Rome Fiumicino if your flight routing requires it. Your travel specialist is reachable until you're home — and a few days later will be in touch to hear which cave, which cliff, or which plate of Puglian orecchiette is still the thing you can't stop thinking about.

  • Final morning in Sorrento at leisure
  • Private transfer to Naples airport
Meals: Breakfast

Where You'll Stay

Hand-picked hotels, every night.

We choose properties for character, location, and the kind of service that makes you feel looked after — not just checked in. Every hotel can be swapped for an alternative if you prefer.

4–5★ centrally located hotel, Rome

Rome

2 nights

4–5★ centrally located hotel

Historic centre

Central position for Forum, Vatican, and Pantheon — all walkable

4–5★ centrally located hotel, Bari

Bari

2 nights

4–5★ centrally located hotel

Historic centre

Walking distance to Bari Vecchia and the waterfront promenade

4–5★ cave hotel or boutique hotel, Matera

Matera

1 night

4–5★ cave hotel or boutique hotel

Sassi district

Staying in a Sassi cave hotel is one of the most distinctive accommodation experiences in Italy — highly recommended

4–5★ hotel with Bay of Naples views, Sorrento

Sorrento

3 nights

4–5★ hotel with Bay of Naples views

Sorrento clifftop

Sea-view rooms available; the hotel position above the bay provides the backdrop for every morning

Hotels shown are indicative of the standard we book. Upon request, we will provide a detailed itinerary with specific hotel options tailored to your preferences and budget.

What's in the Price

Included

  • 8 nights in 4–5★ hotels (double occupancy, including Sassi cave hotel option in Matera)
  • Daily breakfast at each hotel
  • Airport meet & greet on arrival
  • Private airport transfers in Rome and Naples
  • Private driver transfers to and from train stations
  • High-speed Frecciarossa train Rome–Bari
  • All inter-city transfers in private vehicles
  • Luggage handling (1 suitcase per person)
  • Private expert guides in Rome, Bari, Puglia, and Matera
  • Skip-the-line access at Vatican and Colosseum
  • All scheduled tours and transport as per itinerary
  • All entrance fees included in guided visits
  • 24/7 local support throughout your trip
  • Hamilton & Chase digital travel booklet with restaurant and local recommendations

Not Included

  • International flights to Rome / from Naples
  • Travel insurance (required — we can arrange coverage on request)
  • Capri ferry tickets and Blue Grotto entry
  • Lunches and dinners
  • Personal expenses (shopping, additional tastings)
  • Gratuities for guides and drivers (optional but appreciated)
  • City tax (collected directly by hotels, typically €2–5 per person per night)

Good to Know

  • The Matera cave hotel is one of the most distinctive accommodation experiences in southern Italy — we strongly recommend it over a standard hotel in the modern town.
  • Capri and the Blue Grotto are weather-dependent; the grotto closes if sea conditions are unsuitable. We build a Sorrento leisure alternative into the day.
  • All guides and experiences are arranged exclusively for your group — never shared with other travellers.
  • The drive from Matera to Sorrento is scenic and comfortable (approximately 3.5 hours) — we can stop at Pompeii or Paestum on the way if time allows.
  • Flexible booking: adjust or postpone your dates up to 60 days before departure at no charge.

Make It Yours

Optional add-ons & upgrades.

Every trip is different. These extras can be woven into your itinerary — just let your travel specialist know what catches your eye.

Pompeii archaeological site

The Roman city preserved under Vesuvius's ash — easily added on the drive from Matera to Sorrento with a specialist archaeologist guide

From €110 pp

Lecce Baroque city day trip

The 'Florence of the South' — an entire Baroque city in local golden limestone, added as a day trip from Bari

From €130 pp

Osteria del Baccalà cooking class in Puglia

A morning with a Puglian home cook: orecchiette making, fava bean puree, focaccia barese, and a table lunch that requires no evening meal

From €120 pp

Sunset boat tour on the Amalfi Coast

A private motorboat along the coast at golden hour — Positano and Amalfi from the sea, with the cliffs turning gold

From €180 pp

Private Matera food tour

Basilicata's extraordinary food culture — peperone crusco, pane di Matera, and the wines of the Aglianico grape, guided through the sassi's best producers

From €95 pp

"Matera was extraordinary — sleeping in a cave carved out of the same rock people lived in for nine thousand years is not something you forget. The Puglia towns and the Amalfi Coast were both spectacular. This is the Italy trip we should have done first."

Catherine & James P.

Washington DC · South of Italy, October 2025

Common Questions

Questions about this trip.

Is southern Italy safe for tourists?

Yes — Puglia, Matera, and the Amalfi Coast are all well-established tourist destinations with excellent infrastructure, and the regions are known for their hospitality. The south of Italy is, if anything, warmer and more genuinely welcoming than the north. Our local guides are on the ground in each destination.

Can we skip Rome and start directly in Puglia?

Yes — flying into Bari or Brindisi directly and skipping Rome is a valid option. We'd restructure the itinerary to spend more time in Puglia (including Lecce and the Salento coast) and would adjust pricing accordingly. Your specialist can advise on the best routing.

Private Package Journey

South of Italy

9 days / 8 nights

From €4,560

per person

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