Help with port info o Norwegian Epic Mediterranean Cruise??

[weeluvdisney]

We are going on a cruise this summer with stops in Naples, Civitavecchia ,Livorno Italy and Nice and Marseille France. When I look on the Norwegian site there are tours you can pay for. We want to tour on our own. There are also prices for a ride "to town" from where the ship docks. I believe at each stop the bus ride to and from "town" is $99 per person to which I say "WOW."
That is a budget buster to me...5 stops, $99 per person...that's $1000.
Now this is thru the cruise ship which would be safe and I would feel good about that. I just don't think I can justify the money.
I'm wondering if anyone is familiar with these area's and do you know if in these ports where the ship docks, can you walk to these main tourist area's? Or is it too far? Are there any safe alternatives to get to town that don't cost so much? We really would like to tour on foot in these main tourist area's but I have no idea how close or far they are from where the cruise ships dock.
This is something that I would really like to figure out ahead of time so I know how much money we need to take.

 

[sissy_ib]

I would suggest you look at cruisecritic.com. There is info for ports all over the world. I will say we were planing a Med cruise last year that fell through. In the ports we were looking at, including Naples and Civitavecchia, we were going to use public transportation or a private tour.

 

[turning40withMickey]

I second going over to cruisecritic, it is the cruise equivalent of the disboards. You should find a lot of information there! Have fun!

 

[jsmith]

Third vote for cruise critic-tons of info there-and i used their ports of call boards when booking tours for our 2010 med cruise-we did a mix-used a private guide in Ephesus Turkey, and Athens greece-i found another couple to share tours and it was way cheaper than ships tours. used a ships tour in Sicily, and Sardinia because they were short port stops and at least with royal caribbean the ship will wait for ships tours if they are delayed, and i couldnt find a private guide for cheaper for the two of us. The rest of the time-spain,france and italy we just used public transportation -but i speak all three languages. The other thing we did was get European maps for our GPS so we could find our way back to the port and kept the option of getting a cab back to the ship if we needed too.

 

[Tracerr00]

I'm booked for the Disney Med cruise next summer and I bought Rick Steves Mediterranean Cruise Ports book. He's a big fan of doing all of the ports on your own without booking an expensive cruise through your cruise company. For instance - In Civitavecchia I plan to take the train from the cruise port to Termini station (something like $9 round trip) and then at the station I'm going to grab a hop on/hop off bus for around $32 each (they are in a big lot next to Termini). These buses stop at all of the major sights. I was in Rome one other time for a very short time and this is what I did and I managed to see the Spanish Steps, Trevi Fountin, Colosseum, Pantheon, Vatican, etc. You can spend as much or as little time there as you want because you just grab the next bus after you're done. Anyway, Rick Steves book tells you exactly how to get from the port to the train stations at lots of different ports.

I hope that helps!

 

[weeluvdisney]

Thank you for the cruise critic info. I searched on it a bit and found out how naive I was to think there wouldn't be many other options when actually there are buses, trains, taxi's and rental cars to get you to the towns or cities you want to go to.