Cheers! We've been doing more research and asking around a bit, one of the guys at my work went for 3 weeks a few years back as well. Funny enough he said the same about Venice and skipped it. What I might do is do a day trip in and out of Venice and just not stay there as the other thing Ive heard is its quite expensive. Il look into the northern areas youre talking about thats not come up, the one comes up alot is the lake Como which we were planning on skipping. So far the areas we've got on the list are Rome, Milan, Florence, Almafi Coast (Pozitano, Naples and Pompei) and Assisi was another one. We talked about Scicily but Im not sure in 3 weeks we'll have time but were going to start hard planning here in the next week or so and see about budgeting time and money and how long in each place etc. What my co worker did was setup in 3 or so main area's and day tripped into a handful of places from there, except for Rome.