quote:

Originally posted by maryk:
'The secret Venice of Corto Maltese - any suggestions on where I could find a copy?

If you don't find it beforehand, it's available in most bookstores in Venice, in English and other languages (particularly the TI in the Pavilion at San Marco). You can find out a bit more about Corto Maltese series and author Hugo Pratt by checking Wikipedia, or this Amazon link.

The Secret Venice of Corto Maltese...
Have a look at Abebooks.com
Regards
Martha

"Venice for Pleasure" by J.G. Links

From the back cover: "Not only the best guide-book to that city ever written, but the best guide-book to any city ever written." Bernard Levin in The Times.

Probably not the best guide-book for your first visit to Venice, but once you've fallen in love with the place, this book is the best. It's a series of self-guided walking tours, packed with history, literary references, photos, and art. J.G. Links was a wonderful and witty writer who was madly in love with Venice. It's small and portable, and so much fun to read.

For an overall informative guidebook I like the Blue Guides, but as someone mentioned, they're not the most "user friendly". They are well-written with lots of places covered that many guides ignore. They're good as a pre-trip read. For traveling I like the DK Eyewitness Guides' Top Ten booklets as they're packed with easy-to-find information and are very portable. I used the Top Ten Rome a lot when we were in nearby Anzio.

I also love the dining decoder Eating and Drinking in Italy by Andy Herbach and Michael Dillon. Again it's small enough to tote along and has nearly everything in it that I've needed to look up.

Another old thread I came across while doing FAQ: Book on Food in Florence

NOT BUILT IN A DAY Exploring the Architecture of Rome
by George H. Sullivan Carroll and Graf Publishers 2006.

Sullivan is a travel writer not an architect or architectural historian and perhaps that's why this is a very accessible and useful on the ground guide to Rome. The book is organized as a set of twelve tours arranged by neighbourhood and well keyed on four detailed maps. They are actually quite reasonable walks, compact and well organized. Sullivan also suggests modifications to create a possible three day (but dense) itinerary.
The book is a comprehensive array of many or most of the significant architectural sites in the city and often many pages are devoted to a history, analysis and critique of each building. His aim is to explain the architectural/ historical significance of the works and to be opinionated and passionate about it. And thus I suppose invite controversy.
What is most significant about this book is its daily usefulness. For one thing although nearly four hundred pages it is reasonably light. Mainly text, there are some illustrations using historical etchings and also a few illuminating analytic and diagrams but no floor plans to speak of. It is Sullivan's skill at leading your eye over and through the buildings and his instructive analysis that brings the buildings alive and into historical context and even into contemporary perspective. All done in an engaging way that requires little or no previous architectural knowledge.
I effectively plotted my daily itineraries and carried this book regularly in our month long wanders through Rome. I usually found it a more useful and more interesting reference than say the Blue Guide (ninth edition, more than six hundred pages and twice as heavy) which I often used as a supplement for its illustrations, floor plans and more systematic art descriptions that are omitted in Sullivan's scope.
The book is also valid and captivating as a pre/post or armchair travel read.

Thank you for all the good guide suggestions. Is there any book about Italy (or Tuscany, specifically) that is on par with The Food Lovers Guide to France? I LOVED that book when touring the south of France, covering restaurants and market days, etc.

I came across in interesting find in my favorite bookstore for travel books and maps.

Moleskine has put out a series called City Notebooks, and there is one for Rome. I always use Moleskine notebooks for my trip journals, but this one is great. It has maps (reprinted from Lonely Planet) and a street index at the front, the ATAC metro map, lots of blank pages, followed by indexed sections for writing notes by topic. The index is fairly flexible, as there are some pre-printed and blank stickers so you can customize the tabs. They also include several pages of sturdy tracing paper for doing itineraries over the maps, plus the usual pocket at the back for bits of paper.

According to the copyright page, they are also available for Amersterdam, Barcelona, Berlin, Dublin, Lisboa, London, Madrid, Milano, Paris, Prague, and Wien.

Does anyone know of a good detailed guide for the Val d'Orcia area or the Siena province? I've seen several good Tuscany guides, but most of them cover such a large area that there aren't many details about the specific neighborhood we'll be in. We're staying near Pienza for five days, so Montalcino, Montepulciano, the abbeys, Bagno Vignoni, etc, etc.

I'd rather not carry several guidebooks with bits & pieces of info--a book on this particular area would be great! If there isn't one... perhaps I should move there for a couple years and write a good one!

I much prefer the Rough Guides to the Lonely Planet series. I can never seem to get the sense of a place from LP.

The Moleskine city notebooks are very handy (as are their pocket-sized "cahiers" notebooks).

quote:

Does anyone know of a good detailed guide for the Val d'Orcia area or the Siena province? I've seen several good Tuscany guides, but most of them cover such a large area that there aren't many details about the specific neighborhood we'll be in. We're staying near Pienza for five days, so Montalcino, Montepulciano, the abbeys, Bagno Vignoni, etc, etc.

I had this same requirement, plus wanted good coverage of the area around Saturnia/Pitigliano and the Maremma. After perusing many, many guidebooks in the local Barnes and Noble, I ended up with the Rough Guide to Tuscany and Umbria. (I needed Umbria information too.) It had far superior coverage for these areas than any of the other books I looked at. Still, its only a very small percentage of the Tuscany section---so if anyone else has other suggestions, I'd like to hear! (for Southern Tuscany and Maremma--I think we are well covered for Umbria.)

I've recently been reading "Insight Guides Southern Italy," First Edition (updated) 2006. I'm finding it to be one of the very most helpful travel guides I've seen. Packed with history, culture, great photographs of scores of sites and sights in all the southern regions.
CharlesG

Italian Camping
Camping & Caravaning
Touring Club of Italy
ISBN 88-365-2963-1

This TCI pub identifies camping facilities.
Locations and amenities.
Very useful if you are renting an RV.
Check Ebay or Amazon.
Mike

Besides James/Jan Morris's magnum opus on Venice, I also like an old Gallimard guide of Venice, in which every house on the canal is delicately illustrated. It is translated and "adapted" from the English original written by Elizabeth de Farcy. I have read both the English and French version. For some reasons, the French version is more detailed.
Not to be confused with the Guide Gallimard series, also all good. Well illustrated, plus detailed text on art, architecture and even literature. But the Guide Gallimardd series usually don't have maps. A guide book with no map?

I like Rebecca Ford's book "Footprint Siena & the Heart of Tuscany" (Footprint Books, 2005). Small size (240 pages, 4 x 6 inches / 10.5 x 14.5 cm) makes it easy to carry around. Includes a nice map of Siena. Nearby towns (including San Gimignano, Arezzo, Volterra, and Chianti) are covered; however, Florence is not. Just a few pages of color photos (but that's OK, right, since you're there?).

For Rome, "City Secrets Rome" (edited by Robert Kahn, The Little Bookroom, 1999) is full of treasures. Not necessarily for the first-time visitor, "City Secrets Rome" features short descriptions of architectural landmarks, artworks, sites of historic significance, and a few restaurants--written by university professors, architects, artists, art historians, and archaeologists.

I hesitate....

Today I picked up - "City Walks: Rome", a flash card style 50 walks for Rome.

We like "City Secrets Rome" also, Eyewitness series and H.V. Morton.

Not a guide book, but a small book packed with information:
"City of the Soul" by William Murray, published in 2003.

An intriguing string, and a gold mine for our second trip to Venice this fall. Thank you all! I was especially thrilled by the mentions of Georgina Masson's guide to Rome, as I believe this was the hardback I packed on a wide-eyed GI's visit to the Eternal City circa 1966. It served wonderfully, among other things putting me, all alone for a precious minute or two, in the Sistine Chapel!

Dave

We just returned from a month in Italy - Rome, Florence, and Venice. Several months before we left I started checking out different travel guides from the library - Italy as a whole, and the individual city guides. This was massively helpful, because we all have such different qualities we want in a guidebook. (I've been partial to Lonely Planet in the past, but somehow didn't jive with their latest Italy guides. Good thing I found that out before buying them. Grazie to the San Francisco library!)

I ended up buying TimeOut's shortlist Rome 2007. Like all guides, there were plusses and minuses. I liked that it was updated with some of the latest info. I liked that it was smaller than the full version, so it was less weight in my bag that I was carrying around all day everyday. However, I also wanted more description of sites, which was skim Shortlist is the truncated version. The other thing I liked about TimeOut is that it has a really extensive gay/lesbian section. And it has a Rome bus map on the back pages which, though confusing, can be helpful to have with you if you're planning to use the bus. Shortlist has a smaller area for the bus map (smaller page size after all).

I also relied a little on the Rick Steves' Rome 2003 that was left in the apartment we had rented. He has good descriptions of history and context for sites and museums, which is great if you're into that. Which I am. The other nice thing about the Rick Steves book is that it had a detailed map of the Forum, which was so appreciated as I walked through the masses of rubble and ruins, and wanted to know what had been what.

We didn't have a Florence guide because Bex had been there before.

I also had TimeOut Venice 2007 (full version) which I worked. I found that I didn't use the guidebook in Venice as much as I did in Rome. I didn't carry it around all day, but I did use it to refer to at night to read up on where I had been and to glance over where I might go, etc in the coming days. What was most essential for me in Venice was the food section in TimeOut, the Chow Venice book, my trusty Streetwise Venice map, and the vaporetto guide.

(Feel free to check out our blog from the trip)

I have been using Cadogan guides since I travelled around the Loire valley 10 years ago and as a regional guide to N.W.Italy I find their "Italian Riviera and Piedmont" to be the best of several guide books we have acquired over the years, loads of detail and much more background information then any other guides. I don't know about tearing pages out as the reviewer says, I like to keep my old guide books, but I suppose its quite practical if you don't want to carry the book everywhere you go like the Lonely Planets I used to come across in Bali,Thailand Goa etc.

Also National Geographic has a good guide of Piedmont, lots of nice pictures and route maps, although some of their routes I find a bit unpractical. I presume their other guide books of Italy would be up to the same glossy standard.

While I tend to do lots of research prior to my trip, and that is where I would delve into some of the more specific volumes mentioned already -- the two volumes I am most likely to bring along with me are a DK guide and an Access guide.

I'm a big fan of the Access guides put out by Richard Saul Wurman. These tend to be only of cities, but if cities are where you're going -- they're great. I know firsthand that his volumes on Rome, and Florence/Venice are very handy.

Wurman gives his reviews and info by neighborhood, so as you're walking along,you can see what else is nearby. They're great for planning out your days ahead of time, and they're great for when you're walking and suddenly get hungry, you don't have to go flipping through too many pages to find a good place to eat.

I like having the DK guides because we almost always travel with our kids -- so they're good for a review of our day, plus getting them psyched for our next day's plans.

Free on-line guidebooks from books.google.com

You can access on-line copies of out-of-copyright guidebooks to Italy, Rome, and numerous other places by going to books.google.com. This website contains scanned copies of old guidebooks such as the 1904 Baedeker "Italy from the Alps to Naples" and the 1875 August J.C. Hare "Walks in Rome". Many of the books can be downloaded as PDF files. Use the advanced search functionality to locate books for a specific area.

I found it quite interesting to learn how the Victorians and Edwardians toured and about how the localities and cultures of 100-150 years ago differ from today. The books are very detailed - much more detailed than today's guidebooks. I learned more about Rome from reading "Walks in Rome" than I did from the current Blue Guide. The older guides are also opinionated - a feature too frequently absent from today's guidebooks.

This quote from the Baedeker guide (a shorter "best of" guide that is still 400+ pages) illustrates how travel has changed:

"The present Handbook for Italy, which has been compiled from the three more detailed volumns for Northern, Central, and Southern Italy, is designed for the use of travelers who are obliged to compress their tour into a space of four or five weeks." (I'm more "obliged to compress" visits into 4 or 5 days.)

To me the older guides seem to be a good match with the aim of slowtrav - longer stays and more detailed explorations. And they are fun to read.