No comments about Umbria, the Marches and San Marino (Black's Italian Regional Guides).

5 comments about Hello Italy! a Hotel Guide to Italy, Rome, Venice, Florence & 23 Other Italian Cities: $50-$99 A Night (45-90 Euros) (Hello Italy).

1. I was browsing the internet looking for hotels in Italy when I discovered "An Insider's Guide to Italian Hotels." I loved the author's criteria for for selecting a hotel: room with bath, charming, centrally located, family owned and "$50 to $99 a night for two." My husband and I just returned from 18 days in Italy where we stayed in three hotels reecommended by Ms. Classe. To be accurate, we stayed in specific rooms in those hotels based upon her recommendations of particularly nice rooms. The rooms, the costs and friendly staff were just as she had described. Unique to her book are directions to each hotel from public transportation. In each case we followed her directions from the train station -- by vaporetto in Venice, by foot in Florence, by bus in Rome. What a treat! No more worries about where the cab driver is taking you! Our next trip? France with Margo Classe's "An Insider's Guide to French Hotels!" We're sold!



2. If you are going to Rome, Florence, Siena, Milan or a number of other cities in Italy and want good accomodations with private bath but don't want to spend too much then you are in luck because Margo Classe has done the work for you. I would not hesitate to go by her recommendations. I am familiar with several of the places she has visited in Rome and can say she is right on with her observations.
   Also, there are good restaurant recommendations as well as useful info such as bookstore and internet cafe locations.
   As a mature budget traveler I consider Hello Italy! to be an essential item for trip planning.



3. This guidebook is a traveler's best possible friend, especially if you want to save a little money yet still stay in wonderfully locations that are clean and well managed. Buy this book first---it may be all you need!



4. Excellent for those whose want to save money on hotels and not worry about sacrificing quality. My husband and I married in Italy and stayed for a total of 5 weeks. We traveled as far North as Milan and as far South as Sicily. The only hotel reservation we had before we left to go to Italy, was for our wedding (3 nights). The remainder of the time, we used Margo's book and hotel signs throughout Italy. Her book was perfect for what we needed!! I recommend this book to anyone that asks, "So, where should I stay in Italy? Isn't it expensive for hotels?" It doesn't have to be. Margo writes her reviews of the hotels/rooms in a way that a friend would describe it to you - straight forward.

   Thanks for helping make our visit to Italy enjoyable and affordable!




5. Affordable lodging seems to be an oxymoron for travel in Italy. Even with the abundance of information on the Internet and proliferation of guide books, it is almost impossible to find. For clean, safe, accessible lodging options that fall between the Ritz and a hostel, ie. in the price range of better motel US chains, this is the one and only book. And because each location is individually owned, there are added bonuses: charm and pride of ownership. With selection, pricing, directions, and a description of each room, a successful choice is almost assured. Now if I could only find a way to subsidize an opportunity to use this book....

1 comments about Uffizi Gallery: Galleria Degli Uffizi (Great Discoveries Personal Audio Guides: Florence).

1. The Uffizi gallery is a huge place and I really appreciated they way this tour guided me through the museum. They picked the most important artifacts from each room and really gave me an appreciation of renaissance art. Rather than following someone around in a big group holding a sign, this tour allowed me to enjoy the entire museum at my own pace. I especially enjoyed the music provided throughout the tour. This is without a doubt the best way to see the Uffizi Gallery

No comments about Authentic Sardinia (Authentic Italy).

No comments about The Road To Rome, A Modern Pilgrimage.

5 comments about Mother Tongue: An American Life in Italy.

1. If ranked on the scale of self-indulgence, this book beats "Under the Tuscan Sun" hands down, and this is not praise for Frances Mayes. On the strength of the too-kind-by-half editorial and customer reviews on this page, I bought this book hoping for an unromanticized picture of living in Italy. I got instead a maundering exercise in microscopic navel contemplation. Worse, every time a promising detail appears it somehow turns into an unwelcome sermon. This unpleasantly disjointed book veers off into irrelevancy so often and so distractedly one wonders if the author wouldn't benefit from a course of Ritalin therapy. It's true that there are scattered here and there tiny passages of insight into being in Italy as something other than a tourist, but they are too few, and frequently so obscure that I had to read passages three times to wring any meaning at all out of them. Three-quarters of the way through, the conviction that I was searching for pennies in a pigsty overcame my determination to slog through somehow: it just wasn't worth the effort. I'm not proposing this should have been something so prosaic as a travelogue; I was looking for the inner voice as well as practical knowledge. As someone who has studied in and traveled to Italy many times, I've warily considered moving there, and have sought out books that can provide real insight into living in Italy from an expatriate's perspective. "Tuscan Sun" wasn't it, because it really wasn't about living in Italy at all, and despite its relentless charm it was superficial and unconvincing. Equally unwelcome, though, are the dime-store philosophizing, the fractured polemics and the arty but artless syntactical histrionics of this work, particularly since there's so little real information contained in it.



2. This book examines related and ramifying themes: a complex accomodation to the writer's life abroad in her second marriage to a gifted Italian scientist, the life of her late Italian mother-in-law, the rewards and challenges of raising an American-born daughter in Italy, and the history of Parma as an expatriate discovers it. through an idiosyncratic and utterly charming progression of chapters. The gifted poet and essayist behind these reflections emerges in a self-portrait unobtrusively yet indelibly. Life and death challenge her, an adopted country both welcomes and resists her: a sensibility of great depth and nuance undergoes reshaping in the event. Wallis Wilde-Menozzi's subsequent book of lyrics, BEES AND OTHER POEMS (2001), carries this sensibility into free verse of distinction and agile grace. The prose here, like the poems printed subsequently, manifest an integral stylist, who inquires with sharp eye and open heart, and makes the connections that want to be made, both the elusive and the penetrating ones. A distinguished and inventive book.

   John Peck




3. The style is very disappointing, heavy and full of redundant notes. There are three main -and disconnected- threads: the city of Parma, her experiences in Italy and her "lectures" about Italian/American lifestyle.
   1) PARMA: all the well known information about the history of Parma and its famous citizens (from the middle ages to Attilio Bertolucci)spread every three pages made the reading unbearable;
   2)PERSONAL EXPERIENCES: probably the most interesting subject, but, unfortunately, she gets lost in the narration of too many details without focusing on and the impact and the understanding of the Italian reality;
   3)HER LECTURES: here is the most disapponting point because of her superficial judgments about italian culture, traditions and institutions. Instead of describing the "how" and "why" she indulges in old stereotypes and boring lectures on American liberalism and individualism. What a pity...



4. As someone who has, for the last five years, tried to balance my life in the States and my life in Italy, this book has had a lasting impact on the way I view myself as an American, a foreigner, a writer, and an adopted Italian. The book is heavy - it isn't a light travelogue by any means - but anyone with patience and a true desire to dig a little deeper will be rewarded. I carry it with me every time I travel and I re-read passages that seem to speak to me in that moment - the chapter on bread is a favorite.



5. It's difficult to describe this book as simply a memoir when the writing is at times as eloquent as poetry and the themes range from Italian history and politics to individualism and family all the way down to violets outside the window and bread on the table. Above all is the issue of identity- of speaking with an American voice in another landscape- and the struggle that arises when someone gifted, youthful and inquisitive lands in an inward-looking place stiffly rooted in tradition and sameness.
   
   Among the rules and formalities of Italian life, Wilde-Menozzi exhibits a fierce determination to explore and understand both the limits and depths of her new country while trying to maintain the largely American ideals of optimism, free will and self-actualization. What I appreciate about this book is the sincerity and scope of her search for a sense of belonging and connection. With a tone that is rebellious at times, she looks to politics, women in history, Italian behavior, food and culture for answers and comfort and ultimately finds solace in her own powers of observation, analysis and invention. The result is an insightful and daring book rich with beautifully observed elements of modern Italy which also manages to be a deeply moving and personal work.

No comments about Florence Pocket Map and Guide (Eyewitness Pocket Maps & Guides).

2 comments about Timeless Venice: Discovering Today's City in a Map 500 Years Old.

1. Fascinating little book and the best version of the Barberi map that I have come across, and I have many.



2. The idea is a nice one -- pictures of places in Venice as they are today, coupled with their representations on the famous Barbari map. But the catch -- and it is a big one -- is that you have to view each pair accompanied by the somewhat self-satisfied narrator. He schoolmarms a history of each place at very great length before we see the pairing, and you have to go thru the process every time you wish to look, or look again, at any of the many places available. Not at all for reference or browsing: one would not want to go thru all that more than once.
   And when you wish to exit the program, there is an interminably long list of credits before it closes.

No comments about Italy Spiral Guide (Aaa Spiral Guides).

No comments about Lonely Planet Best Of Turin (Lonely Planet Encounter Series).