The Best Place in Europe for a Couple, After Trying Five of Them

Josef and I have been going to Europe together since we were young and broke and sharing a single sandwich on a train platform because we had misjudged the cost of everything. We are neither young nor broke now, and we have been back many times: Spain, France, England, Iceland, and Italy, some of them more than once.

People planning their first big trip as a couple always ask the same question, and it is a fair one. If we only get one, where should we go. So I am going to tell you honestly what each of these places gave us, what it took from us, and then I am going to make my case for the one I would choose again tomorrow, which is Italy.

Spain

Spain is the easiest country in Europe to be happy in. The food is superb and it is served at hours that suit people who like to linger, which we do. Seville in the spring smelled like orange blossom for an entire week and I still think about it. Barcelona gave us a Gaudí morning that genuinely moved Josef, who is not a man given to being moved by architecture.

What Spain takes from you is a bit of your energy budget. The country runs late. Dinner at ten in the evening is charming the first three nights and then, if you are our age and you like a book before bed, it starts to feel like a negotiation. The summer heat in the south is also no joke. We went in June once and lost the middle of every day to it.

Best for: couples who love food, warmth, and a slow social pace, and who do not mind eating late.

France

France gave us the single most romantic evening of our married life, on a bench near the Pont des Arts with a bag of cherries, and it also gave us our worst argument in twenty years, in a train station in Lyon. That is France in a sentence. It is glorious and it is exacting.

Paris rewards preparation and punishes improvisation. The countryside, on the other hand, is close to perfect. A week in the Dordogne or Provence with a rented car, a market on Saturday morning, and no schedule at all is one of the great pleasures available to two people. The food is beyond argument and the wine at the middle price range is better value than anywhere else on this list.

What France takes from you is money and a certain amount of patience. It is the most expensive country here after Iceland, and the service culture is formal in a way Americans sometimes misread as coldness. It is not coldness, it is a different set of manners, but it does mean you have to meet the country halfway.

Best for: couples who want elegance and are willing to plan for it.

England

England is the gentle option, and I mean that as a compliment. No language barrier, no currency arithmetic in your head at every counter, and an extraordinary amount of history within an easy train ride. We spent a week between London and the Cotswolds and it was restorative in a way I did not expect. The pubs are the most comfortable public rooms in Europe.

What England takes from you is drama. There is very little that will make your jaw drop. The weather is a constant low-level negotiation, and London prices are close to Paris without London quite delivering Paris's beauty. If this is your one big romantic trip, I think England is a little too much like a comfortable evening at home.

Best for: a first trip abroad, or a return trip where rest matters more than wonder.

Iceland

Iceland was the most astonishing place we have ever stood. There is a stretch of road in the south where you come over a rise and the landscape simply stops behaving like anywhere you have been, and Josef pulled the car over and neither of us said anything for a while. We saw the northern lights on our third night from the parking area of a small guesthouse, and I cried, which was embarrassing and worth it.

What Iceland takes from you is a great deal of money and most of your comfort. It is punishingly expensive. A plain dinner for two ran us the price of a very good meal in Italy. The driving is real work, the weather can erase a day's plan in an hour, and there is not much to do in the evenings except be together in a small warm room, which is either the point or a problem depending on your marriage.

Best for: a short, awe-seeking trip. Five days, not two weeks, and go with a healthy budget.

Italy, and why it wins

Now the one. If a couple came to me and said we have ten days and one chance and we want to come home different, I would send them to Italy and I would not hesitate for a second.

It gives you everything on one trip

This is the practical argument, and it is the strongest one. In Italy you can have a great city, a great landscape, a great coastline, and great food inside a single week without spending your whole holiday in transit. Three days in Florence, three days in a farmhouse in Tuscany, two days on the coast, and you have seen four completely different Italys. Nowhere else on this list gives you that range in that little distance. Spain comes closest and still requires more driving.

It is built for two people at a table

Italy takes couples seriously in a way I find genuinely touching. Nobody hurries you. A meal is allowed to take three hours. Restaurants are full of Italian couples in their seventies who clearly have been coming for decades, and when you sit down as a pair you are treated as normal rather than as an awkward table size. Josef and I have talked more, and better, over dinners in Italy than anywhere else we have been.

The value is remarkable

Let me do the arithmetic, because it matters. Our ten days in Italy, outside the peak of August, cost us meaningfully less than five days in Iceland and roughly two thirds of what a comparable week in Paris ran us. The house wine is a few euros and it is good. The lunch of the day in a small town is fifteen euros and it is memorable. You are not paying a premium for the beauty, which is the strange miracle of the place.

The people meet you halfway

My Italian is dreadful and it has never once been a problem. Make an attempt at buongiorno, be warm, and Italy is warm back at you immediately. In a small town in Umbria a woman who ran a shop closed it for twenty minutes to walk us to a church she thought we should see. That does not happen everywhere.

And it stays with you

The honest measure of a trip is how often you talk about it two years later. We talk about Italy constantly. Josef still makes a version of a pasta a man in Bologna showed him, badly, with great confidence, and it makes me laugh every single time.

What is not perfect about Italy

I do not want to sell you a postcard. Italy in July and August is crowded and hot to the point of misery in the big cities, and the queues at the famous sights will eat a day if you have not booked ahead. The trains are good but not always punctual. Driving inside historic city centres is genuinely restricted and the fines find you months later at home, so park outside the walls and walk. And service can be brusque in the tourist corridors around the very famous places, which is why I would spend most of your time thirty minutes away from them.

How I would spend ten days

• Days one to three, Florence. Book the Uffizi and the Accademia in advance and eat dinner across the river.
• Days four to six, a rented house in the Tuscan countryside. One market, one winery, and nothing else planned.
• Days seven to eight, Bologna for the food, which I think is the best in the country.
• Days nine to ten, the coast. Cinque Terre if you want the photographs, Camogli if you want the quiet.
• Go in late September or early October. Warm days, thin crowds, lower prices, better tempers.

The short version

Spain if you want ease and food. France if you want elegance and will plan. England if you want comfort. Iceland if you want to be astonished for five days and can pay for it. But Italy if you want the trip that a couple actually remembers, the one where the food, the beauty, the pace, and the price all line up at the same time. It has been our favorite for years and nothing has come close to unseating it.