When all was said and done, I averaged about 100 bucks a day, that was eating a nice dinner, eating breakfast & lunch from the markets, staying at inexpensive but decent hotels, and including train fares (not very expensive) You could get by on less, but as I mentioned, I did not find camping to be that desirable. Watch the low end hostels in Rome, some are real flea bags.

One more note:

Communication - I thought I could get by without a cell phone on my trip to Italy. Hell, I don't even get cell phone reception where I live (a remote corner of California), so I only use a cell phone occasionaly, when I'm in the nearest town running errand. I also would prefer to really be "away" when I'm on a bike trip - i.e. not easily reachable, on an adventure without knowing exactly what's ahead and taking my chances. Well guess again. Even if you don't want to bring a cell phone the world expects you to have one. Example - My wife's luggage was misplaced on the flight to Florence and they would not deliver it unless we had a cell phone. We had several hassles, mostly around the luggage issue, that could only be resolved with a cell phone. We ended up buying one there, a relatively painless process. It really did come in handy for making hotel reservations for towns that I was heading to. I brought an i-Touch with me, thinking that I could use it to check e-mail and use Skype occasionally- Nope! First of all, there is no such thing as free WIFI hotspots in Italy, you have to pay for any internet connection at an internet point. Second, the one place that did offer paid WIFI did not work for my i-Touch, the connection kept dropping. It;s OK, it was worth it to have the e-books and photos of home that I could show folks, but don't count on an i-touch for communication. I read that using an American i-Phone in Europe is prohibitively expensive, but don't have any experience with this.

I hope to post a few photos soon, having problem getting them off my cell phone (that's another story).