Day 1: Fly to London.
Days 2-5: London, and perhaps Cambridge or Oxford.
Days 6-9: Channel Tunnel train to Paris.Paris,Chartres,and Versailles. Night train to
Rome.
Days 10-13: Rome, with a day-trip to Florence.
Day 14: Fly home out of Rome.
Day 15: Fight jet lag, and drive your friends insane with jealousy by casually
referring to “Firenze” and “Roma.”

If you have three weeks, I would recommend adding one day in or around London, two days in Paris, two days in Florence and one day in Venice.Veteran travelers may sneer at such a “short” trip, but who cares? In those two weeks you can see, roughly in order, Westminster Abbey, Big Ben, the Houses of Parliament, Trafalgar Square, the Tower of London and the Crown Jewels, Piccadilly Circus, Buckingham Palace, the British Museum and National Gallery, Cambridge University, the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame, Versailles, the Mona Lisa, the Louvre, the Cathedral at Chartres, the Sistine Chapel, Vatican City, the Spanish Steps, the Trevi Fountain, the Colosseum, the UfHzi Gallery and Michelangelo’s David. Or you could blow off this itinerary entirely and spend two weeks whooping it up in Paris, Provence, Milan, or Mallorca. Or, like one person I know, you could spend two weeks in Belgium and the Netherlands, ignore everything on the above itinerary, and still feel as if there was much more to see in those two small countries.

So you’re hitting the tourist highlights and not spending a month hanging out in Parisian cafes drinking cheap wine and eating snails. So what? You’ve been to Europe once, and if you like it, you can always go back and see more, with all the experience gained on your first trip. And until that next trip you’ve still got Vienna, Munich, Berlin, and a dozen other incredible places to look forward to. Sounds all right to me.