re: General cost range for 12 days Italy? Recs?

As it happens, I just got back on Saturday from a 12-night trip with my daughter and son-in-law:
3 nights Rome
2 nights inn in a vineyard near Orvieto
2 nights Siena
2 nights Florence
3 nights Venice

- We probably averaged $40 per person per day on attractions and entertainment.

- In Rome, we used a taxi from the airport (35 Euros) and took another one to pick up our rental car (20 Euros). Other than that, we took a bus or the Metro a few times, but our hotel was centrally located, so we just walked a lot. We drove from Rome to Florence, and I got a rental for $38 per day, and it was a hybrid with good gas mileage, so transportation for those four days was about $50 per day when you include the tolls and the times I paid for parking. Our train from Florence to Venice was 44 Euros each. In Venice, the vaporettos charge 9.50 Euros for the first ride, but there's a cap of 25 per day or 35 for two days, so I'm looking at my statement now and it says that I paid $40.74 USD for myself for the time I was there, but then we also paid for a taxi to the airport, because the bus was going to be slower than we wanted, and I think that was 35 Euros.

- We were fairly frugal with our meals. Most of our hotels included breakfast, and the days that didn't, we'd just get a coffee and pastry somewhere for a few Euros. We'd usually plan to get one meal each day at a sit-down, full-service restaurant, and the other meal was usually pizza by the slice or a sandwich or even one of the "pasta to go" places, and those "to-go" meals were generally about 10 Euros including a soft drink or lemonade. And we generally got gelato twice a day at 5 Euros each time. Our sit-down meals could be very cheap, as in two people splitting a 10-Euro pizza, but we were more often paying 12-18 Euros each for our own entree at a simple trattoria or osteria. We splurged on an elegant and delicious four-course meal at our inn in Orvieto for the great price of 56 Euros per person (would've been higher in a city). We also ate Florentine steak in Florence, and the minimum cut was 1.2 kg at the price of 60 Euros per kg, so that was 72 Euros. We also did a wine and cheese tasting at a vineyard, farm, and sheep's milk dairy near Pienza, and that was 40 Euros each.

Hopefully, this will give you some ideas and help you with your budgeting process.