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first of all THANK YOU to all who responded for taking the time to send detailed information and encouragement...you all ROCK!

I will include small snippets and some lengthy information- this might be long!

 this seems to be the general consensus : I was in both places last summer--no problem at all! They are very 
knowledgable about celiac disease in Italy and all restaurants were very accommodating. The pharmacies and stores sell gluten free items as 
well.


You 
 can buy gf food  in the pharmacies -  they have  many things available 
on the shelves,  and you can special order  other items and usually get 
it
within 24 hours  (my husband loved the gf beer!  From the 
pharmacy!  In  general,  an easy country to travel in   -  most people 
know what celiac
is, and  even  restaurants without gf menus  can usually serve you.

Google the city and the word gluten free or Celiac or
Celiac in Italian.
http://www.celiachiaitalia.com/pasticcerie-per-celiaci/firenze/il-fresco-senza-glutine-pasticceria-per-celiaci-firenze.html

GF products are sold in "Farmacias"  I would go shopping the first day in each new city.  I always carried snacks/foods/pasta bags with me just in
case.  This way, my 
daughter had a snack and I had pasta available for the restaurants to 
cook if they couldn't help out. Pizza is served at night only in 
southern Italy.  Many restaurants in Southern Italy will have GF pizza.  


See my blog, www.glutenfreediscoveries.blogspot.com  I have two posts on Italy, including info on Rome.  Have a great trip!

Italy is a DREAM for celiacs.  
Every farmacia is stocked with gf shelf stable items.  Eat your way 
through picnics of cured meats and cheeses on GF bread and crackers 
purchased there.  You can even find a GF
cornetto at the farmacia and
 eat it in the neighborhood bar with your morning cappucino.   And bring
 an extra duffle to take home the best dried pasta around.   I was in 
Rome last year (and lived there a while back) and EVERY restaurant I 
went to could
accomodate me.  That being said--no pizza or bakeries, 
although I did have a good GF pizza in Florence.  And it is sometimes 
tough to find gelato that isn't  contaminated with cone crumbs.  One to 
try near the Pantheon is called San Cripsino. They don't
serve in 
cones.  Everyone in Italy knows that "senza glutine" means celiac.  No 
one in Italy is living the "gluten free lifestyle."  All kids are tested
 and everyone with celiac gets extra time off work (to cook!) and a 
discount of GF food in the stores.
  So, no need to seek out specific
 GF friendly eateries.  In Rome for authentic Roman cusine, not at all 
fancy, try Da Enzo in Trastevere.   And for a fabulous more expensive 
meal, La Gensola 
(http://www.fodors.com/world/europe/italy/rome/review-472407.html) also in Trastevere.

 I would recommend taking copies of the gluten free restaurant card in 
Italian, and have non-perishable snacks with you when touring just in 
case you get stuck.  


A place I strongly recommend is a bakery in Florence called Starbene. Here is a link to a description of it: http://www.glutenfreemrsd.com/2012/04/gluten-free-patisserie-florence-starbene-senza-glutine.html  We discovered this when staying in Florence and then returned to it 
from Sienna and again when we were at the Florence train station briefly on our way to Rome. (I waited with our luggage at the station while my 
husband literally ran to the bakery and back.) I know Florence is not on your itinerary, but if you happen to have time to stop on your way to 
Rome, I think it will be worth the detour.
Finding ingredients for cooking at home is very easy. For part of our 
visit, we stayed in an apartment, and we loved going to little shops to 
pick up pasta, pesto, wine, cheese, olives, etc to cook up at home. All 
the pharmacies carry gluten free products, with the bigger pharmacies 
carrying a good selection of pasta, packaged bread, cookies, crackers, 
etc. If you're traveling by train, the train stations often have a 
pharmacy attached to them, which makes for an easy pick up of pasta.
We had one 
dinner in Rome, at Il Viaggio. This restaurant came highly recommended. 
The plus is that they have a huge selection of gluten free menu items. 
For us, personally, it was  disappointment. We went there on our last 
night in Italy to celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary, and we found 
the food to be bland and service slow and unresponsive. According to 
reviews, other people have had a much better experience there. 


We have some reviews of GF-friendly places in Italy on our website, GlutenFreeTravelSite ( http://www.glutenfreetravelsite.com ), which is a website containing thousands of user-submitted GF dining and travel reviews from around the world, searchable by location.

Click Search Reviews on the gray navigation bar going across the top of the 
home page, and select Search by State/Country. Then, you can select 
Italy from under the pull-down menu for Europe. That will take you to 
the page on our site with all the Italy reviews. 

Alternatively, you can visit our Search/Mapping page ( http://glutenfreetravelsite.com/maps/map-locator.php ) and enter a town into the Search Box. You'll get a list of restaurants that have been reviewed. Click on any restaurant to see it highlighted on the map and to link to the user-submitted review. 

We also have a new APP -- free and available for either iPhone or Android 
-- called DINE GLUTEN FREE. It enables you to access the reviews and 
other helpful information on our site when you're on-the-go. Here's a 
link to a page on our site with more information: 

http://glutenfreetravelsite.com/mobileresources.php

Please
 let me know if you have any questions. And please "pay it forward" and 
share any other GF-friendly places you find  -- in Italy or anywhere 
else -- by submitting reviews to our site ( http://glutenfreetravelsite.com/submit.php ). It will benefit the thousands of other people searching our site for guidance on safe GF dining. 

Our
 villa in Tuscany was just outside a small village called Monsummano 
Terme.  Much to my surprise there was a totally gluten free store in 
town.  It was huge!  I
truly couldn't believe it--I've never seen 
anything like it in the U.S. If you are anywhere near I would encourage 
you to go.  It was called
Benessere Senza Glutine, on via Cesare Battisti.
Otherwise,
 in Rome my favorite was Volia di Pizza, on via del Giubbonari.It just 
happened to be a five minute walk from our hotel, which was most
fortunate.  They had "senza glutine" signs on everything--several on the
door, and on the menu.  They had delicious GF pizza,
 bruschetta, desserts, etc.  The tiramisu was so delicious!  It was very casual, and was a fun
place to sit outside and people watch.

Overall
 it was very easy to eat.  Most restaurants have GF pasta they can serve
 you, with fewer having GF pizza, but it was still more prevalent
than
 in the U.S.  Not as many GF desserts as pizza and pasta, but still had 
plenty.  And if all else fails, you always have gelato!  Also, I found 
myself walking in a pharmacie most every day to check out their GF 
selection.  Normally even the smallest store had a larger selection of 
GF
items than our typical grocery stores.  I carried Schar bread (a 
package of about 6-8 slices that most stores had) in my tote so I could 
enjoy
bread and the delicious olive oil with my meals like everyone 
else had. That worked out great.  Also, all of our hotels included 
breakfast, and I
told them ahead of time and they all had a
 nice selection of bread, rolls,crackers, cereal, etc. for me to choose from.  Our hotel in Florence even
had a huge selection of GF snacks in our room for me when we checked in.

Before I went this time, I bought a book entitled The Gluten-Free Guide to Italy by Maria Ann Roglieri. I ordered it from Amazon. It lists Italian cities 
and towns by region and the restaurants, grocery stores, gelato shops, 
etc., that have gluten free offerings or have been trained by the 
Italian Celiac Society. In big cities it is not as helpful as I had 
hoped because it is very time consuming to locate each restaurant on a 
map. We did not have a car, so we had to find restaurants in the area so we would be able to walk to the places. But I did find several great 
restaurants listed in the book that I would not have discovered 
otherwise. You might want to look into it.

I have always found that Italian servers are very familiar with gluten 
free dining. I always say "senza glutine" when we first are approached 
by the waiter and sometimes they have gluten free pasta or bread that 
isn't listed on the menu. Since almost all real restaurants are cooking 
the food themselves rather than using prepared products, they know what 
ingredients are in the dishes they serve. When I am in a restaurant that does not have gluten free pasta, I often order a vegetable side dish 
("contorni") as a substitute for the pasta course and then have a 
regular fish/meat/poultry course as the "secondo". I think you will get 
along fine.

When we were in Rome we came across Celiachiamo.com, an all gluten free 
grocery Store at via Giulio Venticinque 32/34 sorta near the Vatican.  
The name of the store is also the address to a website which seems to 
say (it's in italian which I don't read) that there is a second gluten 
free store store.  Check it out espically if you understand italian.

That
 is pretty much IT...sounds like it will be a pleasure...i can't wait to
 try some of the great looking GF stuff they have over there...my fear 
is getting back home with no access to it....i just may have to move 

thank you again to everyone who responded 

*Please provide references to back up claims of a product being GF or not GF*
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