Italy for christmas

Gondolas in Venice (photo from http://www.guardian.co.uk/ )

We 4 are making plans to go to Italy for Christmas. Both B and M get 3 weeks off but because B has to fly here from New Zealand first and home again afterwards we are squishing a trip from Milan to Venice, Rome, Florence and finally Brindisi in 2 and a bit weeks. Its exciting to go somewhere 'developed' for a change and scary because, although we are planning the accommodation, we are going to wing the train travel bit and just buy tickets on the platform.

I can be a spontaneous traveller when we are just tripping over the boarder where decent accommodation can be had for 50USD for all four of us but when we are dropping at least 100€ on a 'cheap' hostel things require a bit more research. I use Lonely Planets Thorn Tree forums and tripadvisor for opinions and tips and sometimes virtualtourist and the Frommers forums but lately we have been having electricity fluctuations, fans speeding up and then slowing down to a near crawl, that knock me off the internet necessitating reconnection, a complete closedown and restart or sometimes even a total unplug and reset of the wireless router - making the whole journey of discovery a very slow and frustrating process.

Still ....Italy at Christmas!...