Try the broker Autoeurope: http://www.autoeurope.com http://www.autoeurope.ca

I looked very closely at rental prices for our recent trip to the UK and their price was the best, when you included all the taxes and extra fees. I just checked and a mid-sized car (automatic) with air conditioning is about USD 1586. Yep, expensive but that includes the mandatory insurance including CDW.

For the UK, we were able to opt out of CDW (covered by our gold credit card) but it seems that it isn't possible for Italy.

Your rental will be with whatever big name car rental agency they have an agreement with - today it's with Europcar. You would pick up your car at the Europcar location. In the UK we got ours from National, I think.

We were happy with both our rentals with them.

As far as cutting costs, you save about USD400 by getting a stick shift (manual) and of course, the smaller the car the cheaper your driving will be. As we were recently discussing, gasoline prices are atrociously high.

You might check out the actual website for the car rental agency to see more about the cars on offer - in this case, go to Europcar and take a look their price. Be sure to check out all the hidden costs - VAT (tax), location service charge, vehicle licensing fee and road tax, third party liability, collision waiver, theft waiver, etc. I noticed when I was hunting that there was quite a variation in what the quote covered. I made a spreadsheet to track it all!

Try also Opodo http://www.opodo.com and of course, all the usual suspects - Travelocity, Expedia, etc. Just check carefully to see that you are comparing apples with apples.

Cheers,

Frances Toronto, Canada