[liber8]

It sounds like you've discovered the secret to travel. You don't have to see all the sights or cram everything into each day. Usually you get more out of it if you take things slowly, be intentional about what you really want to do, and savor each experience. With two small kids now, we usually pick one city per trip and plan (at most) one morning activity and one afternoon/evening activity. Sometimes it's one activity per day, sometimes it's none (maybe we just meander around a neighborhood between meals, like your Virtual Japan experience). Like you said, if you see 10 different Roman churches in one day, the Sistine Chapel becomes just another fresco.

[defaultname]

I realize my comment gave perhaps an inaccurate impression, but even with an incredibly sparse itinerary, and bounteous amounts of time (I spent weeks in Italy. I went through Belgium and France over two weeks. I spent a day just wandering around Paris with no itinerary, in addition to days more doing a variety of things), being completely inundated with new and unknown -- even the most benign door or building -- added to staying in a strange places, eating at strange places, and being detached from your normal life, for me at least made the experience far less...persistent.

The Sistine Chapel experience, for instance, aside from being just a mass of people being shuffled through one of the largest tourist draws in the world, was on a day that started with incidentally seeing Pope JP2 give an address, and ended with seeing the Dalai Lama at Tivoli when going there for a dinner (two spiritual leaders in one day! Yet I remain an agnostic). In the end the Chapel got filed away as "neat some stuff painted on a ceiling". That is an extreme example, but for my "a 100 year old is historic" North American sensibilities, virtually everything in places like Belgium, France and Italy is overwhelming, from the weird little waffle shop in Ypres to the sound of bells, the stones on the street, etc, everything just becomes an onslaught of overwhelming experience.

[denton-scratch]

I spent 3 days in Venice; you can't even scratch the surface in 3 days, but I'd say 3 days is about enough for one visit. If you want to see more, book another visit.

Quite a lot of fine art in Venice isn't in crowded museums; some of it's in little churches, away from the crowds, and some is in smaller private museums, away from the day-tripper trail.

I've never been to Florence. I hear that's overwhelming.

[jaclaz]

>I've never been to Florence. I hear that's overwhelming.

JFYI, Stendhal Syndrome (the term was born in Florence, by a psychoilogist that observed cases among tourists):

https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/stendhal-syndrome-...

Not really-really proved to be an actual illness, and not common, still ...