No comments about Authentic Trentino-Alto Adige (Authentic Italy).

No comments about Insight Guide Museums and Galleries of Florence (Insight Guides (Museums and Galleries)).

2 comments about Fodor's Rome, 5th Edition (Fodor's Gold Guides).

1. I've been to Italy several times.....Rome, Venice, Florence, Bologna, Milan, some of the hill towns, etc. Here are my reviews of the best guides to meet you r exact needs.....I hope these are helpful and that you have a great visit! I always gauge the quality of my visit by how much I remember a year later......this review is designed to help you get the guide that will be sure YOU remember your trip many years into the future. Travel Safe and enjoy yourself to the max!
   
   Fodor's
   Fodor's is the best selling guide among Americans. They have a bewildering array of different guides. Here's which is what:
   The Gold Guide is the main book with good reviews of everything and lots of tours, walks, and just about everything else you could think of. It's not called the Gold guide for nothing though....it assumes you have money and are willing to spend it.
   SeeIt! is a concise guide that extracts the most popular items from the Gold Guide
   PocketGuide is designed for a quick first visit
   UpCLOSE for independent travel that is cheap and well thought out
   CityPack is a plastic pocket map with some guide information
   Exploring is for cultural interests, lots of photos and designed to supplement the Gold guide
   
   Rick Steves' books are not recommended. They may be an interesting read but their helpfulness is very poor. They don't do well on updates, transportation details, or anything but the first-time-tourist routine and even that is somewhat superficial on anything but the mega-major sites.
   
   Frommer's
   These are time tested guides that pride themselves on being updated annually. Although I think the guides below provide information that is in more depth or more concise (depending on what the guide is known for), if your main concern is that the guide has very little old or outdated information, then this would be a good guide for you.
   
   Lonely Planet
   Lonely Planet has City and Out To Eat Guides. They are all about the experience so they focus on doing, being, getting there, and this means they have the best detailed information, including both inexpensive and really spectacular restaurants and hotels, out-of-the-way places, weird things to see and do, the list is endless.
   
   Blue Guides
   Without doubt, the best of the walks guides.... the Blue Guide has been around since 1918 and has extremely well designed walks with lots of unique little side stops to hit on just about any interest you have. If you want to pick up the feel of the city, this is the best book to do that for you. This is one that you end up packing on your 10th trip, by which time it is well worn.
   
   MapGuide
   MapGuide is very easy to use and has the best location information for hotels, tourist attractions, museums, churches etc. that they manage to keep fairly up to date. It's great for teaching you how to use the public transportation system. The text sections are quick overviews, not reviews, but the strong suite here is brevity, not depth. I strongly recommend this for your first few times learning your way around the classic tourist sites and experiences. MapGuide is excellent as long as you are staying pretty much in the center of the city.
   
   Time Out
   The Time Out guides are very good. Easy reading, short reviews of restaurants, hotels, and other sites, with good public transport maps that go beyond the city centre. Many people who buy more than one guidebook end up liking this one best!
   
   Let's Go
   Let's Go is a great guide series that specializes in the niche interest details that turn a trip into a great and memorable experience. Started by and for college students, these guides are famous for the details provided by people who used the book the previous year. They continue to focus on providing a great experience inexpensively. If you want to know about the top restaurants, this is not for you (use Fodor's or Michelin). Let's Go does have a bewildering array of different guides though. Here's which is what:
   Budget Guide is the main guide with incredibly detailed information and reviews on everything you can think of.
   City Guide is just as intense but restricted to the single city.
   PocketGuide is even smaller and features condensed information
   MapGuide's are very good maps with public transportation and some other information (like museum hours, etc.)
   
   Michelin
   Famous for their quality reviews, the Red Michelin Guides are for hotels & Restaurants, the Green Michelin Guides are for main tourist destinations. However, the English language Green guide is the one most people use and it has now been supplemented with hotel and restaurant information. These are the serious review guides as the famous Michelin ratings are issued via these books.



2. What a beautiful city, full of spectacular buildings, cobblestone roads, gorgeous old windows, intricate doors, huge fountains, endless shopping, wonderful food & warm & friendly Italians! Unfortunately our trip to Rome coincided with the Pope's illness & subsequent death (while we were in Rome!), therefore we had no access to the Vatican. But it sure is stunning from outside.
   
   We had no problem finding English speaking Italians in Rome, especially in hotels, restaurants & shops. This book successfully guided us to the Trevi Fountain, Colosseum, Basilica & the Pantheon, just to name a few of our stops. We had a rental car, but parked it & made our way by foot & by taxi. Driving in Rome is scarier than driving in Manhattan, especially with all of the mopeds turning in many directions at the same time!
   
   This book made our days in Rome enjoyable, the restaurants suggested were all great. My husband fell in love with gelato, so we ended our days at different gelato counters. I fell in love with my daily cappucinos & pana cotta! I am not a coffee drinker, but went through cappucino withdrawls when I got home. I am now a pro at making pana cotta, oh it's divine!
   
   The road side vendors are peddling some of the best proscuitto & rocket paninni sandwiches I had in Italy! I still think about those $2 sandwiches a year later! : )
   
   If you're planning a trip to Rome you must get this book to guide you. My husband & I talk continuously about going back again very soon.

2 comments about Insight Pocket Map Rome (Insight Pocket Map).

1. I found this folding map to be too small, and very inconvenient to use. Others were much better.



2. After a week of struggling with this map I finally gave up and bought a new one. The format is great. It's very easy to keep in your pocket and unfold discreetly. Unfortunately, because of that the map doesn't have much detail, and doesn't list the names of many smaller streets. If you want to get off the beaten path at all this map is useless. There are much better options.

1 comments about Their Other Side: Six American Women and the Lure of Italy.

1. Reviewed by Paige Lovitt for Reader Views (1/07)
   
   The author, Helen Barolini, felt drawn to Italy as a child. She was a student in Rome after WWII. She writes about six American women and how their attraction to Italy helped increase her own ties to her ancestral homeland. With each woman she explored these questions, "Why had they come? What had they found? What was given to them by their exposure to an old world land and culture? What had changed their lives?" She also explored the answers to these questions in regards to her own life.
   
   She first writes about Margaret Fuller (1810-1850). Fuller was sent to Europe as the first American woman overseas correspondent. She had a child with and married an Italian man. Unfortunately, they perished in a ship wreck on their way back to the United States. Barolini felt a connection to Fuller because she was also a young American journalist living in Italy. She described Fuller as "socially enlightened, original thinker, loyal, generous and heroic."
   
   Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) was a New Englander who wrote about Italy in her poetry. While she was alive she published less than twelve poems. After her death over a thousand poems were found in her dresser drawer. Emily never visited Italy, yet she still felt drawn to it and wrote about it in many of her poems.
   
   Novelist Constance Fenimore Woolson (1840-1894) also wrote about Italy. She was buried in Italy after committing suicide. Mabel Dodge Luhan (1870-1962) was an heiress who moved to Italy while she was in search of herself. She was a memoirist who Barolini described as a "symbol of sexually emancipated, self-aware New Woman in control of her own destiny." She was "Famous for being Famous."
   
   She also discussed the life of Princess Marguerite Caetani (1880-1963) who wrote the literary review "Botteghe Oscure." This was published twice a year from 1948-1960. Barolini describes this American-born woman who married a European prince, as guarded and reticent. The final person that she writes about is Iris Origo (1902-1988). This American woman married an Italian nobleman. She wrote biographies and established a refuge for people fleeing Mussolini's fascism.
   
   The lives of these women spanned from 1810 to 1988. Each of these women was special and had many traits to be admired. I can understand how Barolini felt connected to them through their ties to Italy. Including Barolini, all were American-born and all felt a special connection to the country. In addition to learning more about the lives of these women, I also learned more about the richness of the Italian culture. I highly recommend this book "Their Other Side: Six American Women and the Lure of Italy."

3 comments about Blue Guide The Marche, First Edition (Blue Guide the Marche).

1. I am planning a trip to Le Marche, Italy, and was glad to find this guide. There just aren't many books on this region of Italy, so choices are very limited. I was delighted to find ANY guide to Le Marche!
   
   What the book lacks is emotion and a sense of excitement. It fails to impart a "feel" for the place. You won't find many pictures, nor any of the compelling qualities you experience with many travel guides. It is almost too clinical in it's presentation.
   
   But what it lacks in emotion, it more than makes up for in details given. The Blue Guide, has information on even the smallest towns. It gives incredible detail as to the history of each location, as well as places of lodging, and restaurants. History buffs will love this book.
   
   The region looks fascinating. The New York Times calls it "The next Tuscany". Mountains, rolling hills studded with ancient castles, romantic hill towns, sea coast, great cuisine. Get excited about this region by doing a little web research...this book will point you in the right direction.



2. My husband is from Marche, and we have made numerous trips there. This is a great travel guide of the province. I am enjoying reading it and sharing it with my extended family.



3. I'm just back from 10 days in Le Marche. It's such a beautiful region, though largely ignored by tourists and guidebooks. I was lucky to have friends who recently purchased a home in the region and have been traveling there for years. This was the first time they had seen a guidebook for Le Marche, and they were impressed by the specific information on all the little towns that dot the mountain tops there. In fact, they liked it so much that I left it at the house for them and their future visitors to enjoy. I might even buy another one to have to plan my next trip there!

5 comments about The Wildest Place on Earth: Italian Gardens and the Invention of Wilderness.

1. John Hanson Mitchell has spent the past two decades prowling a square mile or so of suburban woods and fields in Eastern Massachusetts, searching for its past and speculating on its future, and in the process producing 4 books (Ceremonial Time, Living At the End of Time, Walking Toward Walden, and Trespassing) dealing with the nature of place and its affect on the people who live there. His latest book, The Wildest Place on Earth, may at first glance seem, if not exactly a detour, at least a stroll down a side street, away from his favorite square mile of land known as Scratch Flat, but read on and you will find that Mitchell is once again exploring in small spaces.

   In The Wildest Place on Earth, Mitchell sets out to discover the nature of the American wilderness and the influence of Italyýs tamed landscapes on the American experience. In a series of rambles that span decades and move effortlessly from the history of Renaissance gardens to American conservationists, and the Hudson River school of landscape painters to encounters in Americaýs overcrowded and over-loved wilderness parks, Mitchell pokes and prods and writes of the past. This book is part travelogue, and part informed speculation as Mitchell comes to realize that wilderness is perhaps more a concept than a true reality for most of us, and that the wildest place on earth may be his own somewhat haphazardly planned backyard garden that has grown over the past decade into a lush and relaxing presence.

   Mitchell writes much in this book about the Greek and Roman myths and how they influence, even to this day, what we see and feel as wilderness. The god Pan is always present, and the history of mazes and labyrinths makes for some fascinating side trips through Italy. If you are looking for a few good modern-day gardening stories, he supplies those as well.

   The editor of the Massachusetts Audubon magazine Sanctuary and the winner of the 1994 John Burroughs essay award and the 2000 New England Booksellerýs Award, Mitchell is a graceful stylist who will win you over as he rambles an speculatesýmuch like a close friend who you may not always agree with, but you canýt stop listening to those provocative opinions.




2. Like a ramble through a garden, or through the twists and turns of a maze, Mitchell takes the reader on a casually structured walk through memory, opinion, and speculation. He jumps from topic to topic in an engaging manner without exploring in any great depth his subjects -- the history of gardening in Italy and America, a few favorite writers (Thoreau, Wharton), his own large garden, his personal history, encounters with interesting people, the American conception and use of wilderness, urban encroachment, mazes and monsters, some colorful myths and stories. Nor does he need to go deep. His attempt in these related essays seems to be to introduce the reader to a great variety of ways of thinking about gardens, to provide different pathways through the subject, different perspectives. And he succeeds. Despite his overly ambitious subtitle ("Italian Gardens and the Invention of the Wilderness"), which suggests a strong unifying theme that the book is not disciplined enough to provide, he continually evokes the beauty and mystery of gardens as places of internal as well as external discovery. Constantly on the lookout for an iconic, sexless Pan, Mitchell finds the demigod in humans, goats, decorative statues, the center of a maze, and, ultimately, in the enduring metaphor that survived the arrival of Christianity not just to exist on its own, but also to inform the imagery of Satan. There are several startling moments as he gently guides us on his personal journey, such as the fact that in the 1960s scientists discovered lead from auto exhaust embedded in Arctic ice, or his encounters with an unnerving hiker in one of our national parks. Throughout, Mitchell's abiding faith in the garden, in the importance of human contact with the earth, sustains the book's meditative and thoughtful tone.



3. This book is a pilgrimage. Not a linear pilgrimage that sets off from a given point and progresses towards a distant goal, but a pilgrimage through a labyrinth or maze - a circular pilgrimage, if you will.

   The writer, a naturalist with a home and garden in eastern Massachusetts, is at home also in the wilderness of the western United States as well as in thr historic gardens of Italy. He traces for the reader the influence that the great gardens of Italy, part cultivated, part bosky wilderness, have had on the development of both the gardens and the wilderness of the U.S. But the book is not so simple and direct. Through it runs the theme of the labyrinth, its symbolism of the complexities of nature, its paradoxes, twists and turns.

   The true spirit of wildness is seldom to be found, the writer says, in our large "wilderness" parks polluted by ATV's, rangers and over-run camp sites. Human connection with the land is most strongly felt in our gardens - not the front yard with its neatly mowed lawn and well-pruned foundation planting but a truly creative garden with wild spaces and vistas that welcome wild creatures. We can save some land from developers, build small parks, add in gardens with their boskyness (lovely word, that) and create our own web of wilderness even in our most built up areas,

   Did the nature god Pan die with the birth of Christianity and the idea of dominion over all the creatures of the earth? The writer is optimistic that he did not and that the true spirit of nature can be revived, one natural garden space at a time.

   This is the work of a respected nature writer who is stringing together ideas about wilderness and gardens loosely and creatively. It is both evocative and provocative, a mental ramble for an open and enquiring mind.




4. This book is a pilgrimage. Not a linear pilgrimage that sets off from a given point and progresses towards a distant goal, but a pilgrimage through a labyrinth or maze - a circular pilgrimage, if you will.

   The writer, a naturalist with a home and garden in eastern Massachusetts, is at home also in the wilderness of the western United States as well as in thr historic gardens of Italy. He traces for the reader the influence that the great gardens of Italy, part cultivated, part bosky wilderness, have had on the development of both the gardens and the wilderness of the U.S. But the book is not so simple and direct. Through it runs the theme of the labyrinth, its symbolism of the complexities of nature, its paradoxes, twists and turns.

   The true spirit of wildness is seldom to be found, the writer says, in our large "wilderness" parks polluted by ATV's, rangers and over-run camp sites. Human connection with the land is most strongly felt in our gardens - not the front yard with its neatly mowed lawn and well-pruned foundation planting but a truly creative garden with wild spaces and vistas that welcome wild creatures. We can save some land from developers, build small parks, add in gardens with their boskyness (lovely word, that) and create our own web of wilderness even in our most built up areas,

   Did the nature god Pan die with the birth of Christianity and the idea of dominion over all the creatures of the earth? The writer is optimistic that he did not and that the true spirit of nature can be revived, one natural garden space at a time.

   This is the work of a respected nature writer who is stringing together ideas about wilderness and gardens loosely and creatively. It is both evocative and provocative, a mental ramble for an open and enquiring mind.




5. Not so often do I come across a recently published work and call it a classic -- something worth preserving and handing down to the next generation -- but this is one. It is an honest man's reexamination of how to relate to nature. He wears his erudition lightly, and one has confidence that his thoughts are his own and hard-won.
   
   Like many classics, one gets the feeling that for every sentence written, there were ten he didn't write. The book reminds me in some deep sense of the old masons who taught me my trade. Their words were few, but long thought out, humble, and worth remembering.

2 comments about Pocket Map and Guide Florence (EYEWITNESS POCKET MAP & GUIDE).

1. I love DK guides. I use them faithfully for my travels in Europe. The pocket map and guide are beautifully done, except, my pocket's not that small. If the guide were a bit larger I might be able to read it. Now I have to pack a magnifying glass too. Perhaps it's just me, but I think it could be a bit larger and still fit in my pocket. Especially since I could forget the magnifying glass. Then I have been known to stuff a digital camera in my pocket too. I have a suggestion. Find a pair of jeans. Measure the BACK pocket. Fit the guide to just slip into that pocket. Perfect.



2. We liked this handy little combo of map and guidebook. It slips easily into a pocket and was simple to use. Nice to have the guidebook aspect especially in Florence where there is so much to see that by the time we'd gotten to various sites we'd have forgotten a lot of the details in our larger guidebook. It works very well with the companion larger Florence and Tuscany Guide. Note that the print is quite small, which makes for a compact guide, but was hard for me to read on-site in dark churches. It's a very useful map, but if small print is an issue for you, bring your reading glasses.

3 comments about Microcosms (Panther).

1. This is a rather unusual book. Its genre is that of an essay collection, mixed with guide book, biographies and philosophy. The author tells us about his home town Trieste in north-eastern Italy and the surrounding regions: The inland and coast of Friuli (the region between Venice and Trieste), Piemonte in north-western Italy, the Istria peninsula in Slovenia/Croatia and Southern Tirol in northern Italy. All in all, border region where Italian, Slavic and German cultures meet and mix. The author describes places, landscapes, towns and villages in an intense, reflective and beautiful way, presents persons with interesting, moving, comic, poetic and tragic fates, teaches us some history (certainly not dry), tells some anecdotes, studies some literature and philosophises about landscapes, persons, culture and life itself. The tone changes between dark, poetic and humorous. The main theme of the book is how people live their lives in a microcosm where ways of thinking, language, traditions, and arts are influenced by many cultures and peoples, some gone and some still around. It pays homage to cultural diversity and warns against homogenizing and ethnic cleansing, as in the Yugoslavian Civil War, which the author describes as "the most silly of all wars", and which went on while this book was written. Personally I think the book was very interesting, rich, farsighted and with a very important theme. Sometimes I felt that there were too much philosophy, but it is rather simple and an important part of the book. It is a very European book, dealing with Europe's great heritage of both disastrous border disputes and rich cultural exchange across the borders. For Americans living within borders drawn officially drawn on the map with a ruler this book could be useful when it comes to understand the rich and tragic aspects of Europe's diverse ethnic heritage. But I recommend it to everybody who wants to enjoy a cultural journey to an exciting corner of Europe.



2. This is a wonderful, in-depth exploration of a corner of Europe that most people don't know exists. Over the centuries, Trieste and the surrounding region have been a cultural crossroads; as the border between Italy, Slovenia, and Austria shifted, the city was transformed from a rather sleepy backwater to a major port, and back again. This amalgam of cultural influences has made the region unique, and, as a native son, Magris offers an insider's perspective. But this isn't your average travel book; in a series of (mostly) short essays, he vividly portrays aspects of regional life ranging from the whimsical (the bear that never appears) to the gently ironic (Cafe San Marco) to the grim (memories of wars). In the final essay, where he envisions dying while walking in the city park, he revisits themes from most of the other essays and concludes with a memorable image of "life goes on." I found the book both enjoyable and enlightening as a glimpse into the Triestine mind-set, and I know I'll reread it.



3. A companion to "Danube," "Microcosms" extends Claudio Magris's visionary geography in excursions to places around Trieste: the Adriatic lagoons east of Venice, the Nevoso forest in Slovenia between Trieste and Fiume, the Collina countryside near Turin, the Croatian Apsyrtides archipelago in the Gulf of Quarnero south of Istria and the valley of Pusteria of the Tyrol. Magris enunciates his distinctive vision of geography in a memorable metaphor: "Place are bobbins where time is wound up upon itself. To write is to unravel these bobbins, to undo, like Penelope, the fabric of history. So it is perhaps not a complete waste of time to try to write something down." For Magris, a place is a complex foundation of existence that is an intricate genealogy of nature, time, history and fate.
   
   Each of the places of "Microcosms" has a striking meaning. For example, the Apsyrtides signify immortality or "the pure present moment that is enough in itself and does not tire itself out in the rush towards goals to be reached" or "happiness with no object" from which in "exile" in time "the individual who has lost the absolute seeks to replace it with remedies dreamed out of his own private squalor."The Nevoso embodies a remote mystery--of aeons of time and evanescence--from which we humans are inseparable and it leaves us in harmony with "the primordial inchoate, that pulls back into its womb all things and forms." One morning when the clearing of Pomocnjaki in the Nevoso is a "perfect cathedral of light," a roe suddenly appears and then disappears--"entering and fading in the impenetrable clarity"--magically freeing Magris from fear of death.
   
   Places in "Microcosms" are "wound" with feats of mind and spirit of wonderful lives finding meaning beyond fate. Magris extends lifted admiration and affection for those--like the great poet Biagio Marin who lived in Grado in the lagoons, Don Girotto the archpriest of Revigliasco and the academic and novelist Stefano Jacomuzzi of Cambiona in the Collina--whose lives and writings invoke "the big picture of the infinite, against which all human experience is set," foster the humility of "the smallness of oneself" and of "letting go," promote the conquest of the "vanity" of "taking oneself too seriously" and of "the obsession with impotence" of the "deliriums" of time and indicate a freedom from "fear" of "the vacuous pomp of the world" and above all of death.
   
   In a voice of the distilled wisdom of the ages, Magris tells us: "We die because we forget we are immortal." Without the humility of immortality, we succumb to vanity and death or "the darkness in which 'metaphors die'": "Perhaps this is original sin, the inability to live and love, to live time, each instant to the full, without craving to burn it up, to use it quickly. Original sin introduces death, which takes possession of life, making life seem unbearable in every hour it proffers in its passing, forcing the destruction of life's time, trying to make it pass quickly, like an illness; killing time, a polite form of suicide." A geographer such as the world has has not known, Magris irradiates the earth and residence on earth. "Microcosms" is a celebration of where and when and for whom time and death became immortality. In an existence in which "everything gets misplaced and lost" and "in the fear and the trembling with which life has to be faced" when one "does not know where to find the sense in the things [one] cannot grasp," such men, like "a shepherd to his flock" protecting his "sheep in the midst of wolves," are priceless overseers of wisdom owing to whom "one felt less alone in the shock and the turbulence of things."
   
   We turn the pages of this incomparable book page after great page blessed in the majesty of wisdom and compassion of Claudio Magris and the wonder of post-generic creativity of his book and with the uplifting realization that what we are really holding in our hands is a value of existence in whose fold we are "less alone in the shock and the turbulence of things."

4 comments about Blue Guide Umbria, Fourth Edition.

1. The Blue Guide series focuses on art. If you are looking for hotels, shopping, restaurants, or for entertaining reading, rely on something else. If you're looking for history and art, both the well-known and the quietly tucked away, a list of hours and days open for musuems, holidays (often to be avoided!), as well as addresses of libraries and research institutions, the Blue Guides are for you. They cover almost every artwork in the various regions, and do so accurately. The books guide the reader systematically through churches and museums and include accurate floor plans. Towns are grouped into touring areas, as are neighborhoods in the large cities. Town maps, even for little places, are precise and plentiful. City maps are equally precise and inclusive, even for Venice and Siena,but they are split among several pages, which can make them a harder to follow --- a minor flaw. I use Blue Guides as a textbook for my college students, and I never go to Italy without at least one!



2. I just returned from a trip to Italy which included 4 days in Umbria and 8 days in Tuscany. I found the Blue Guides for both regions outstanding. Not surprisingly, both are quite worn (the best sign of a useful guidebook).

   What makes this guidebook stand out is the incredible breadth of coverage of all tourist sites in Umbria. It is hard to believe that so much information is packed into such a small book. Each chapter represents a tour which covers either a town and its vicinity or a driving circuit. Within each tour, every conceivable tourist destination is identified, including small towns, churches, squares, public buildings, museums, archeological sites, etc. For significant museums and churches, the guide directs you through the works in a logical order. For the most part, individual works/objects are listed but not discussed, but notable works are identified with asterisks. Particularly remarkable works, such as Cathedrals and great fresco cycles, are discussed in more detail.

   If you are interested in Italian art, architecture, and ancient history, then this book tells you where to find it in Umbria, and provides brief descriptions. The guidebook does not teach you the history of art and architecture in Umbria, nor should it. For this, you will need to do some additional reading.

   Fine maps and a brief history are provided for each significant town. Parking advise is provided for most towns, and I strongly suggest you follow this advise. (I learned this the hard way.) Also pay close attention to the opening hours, which are quite accurate. The guide's hotel and restaurant recommendations seem quite good; they overlap significantly with the Michelin Red Guide and Frommers. Unfortunately, no descriptions or prices are provided, so most people will want another guidebook for this use. Some of the site closure information was out of date, but I expect this to be updated with the 2000 edition.




3. The Blue Guide is the most exhaustive guide on art in Umbria I came across. Usually this fairly small - and touristically not yet overexploited - region is treated together with Tuscany and/or Le Marches. So if you really want to focus your trip only on Umbria and art is your main concern, this is the guide to take along.

   It must be said that visually the guide has not much to offer : the lay-out is conservative and illustrations are kept to a minimum (no pictures, shaky pen drawings only).The city maps are very helpful.

   The depth of information offered is however staggering - and to a certain extent misleading : even the most insignificant borough gets jubilant descriptions of frescoes, oil paintings, sculptures and other works of art that are on display. Often however the actual quality of the art collections shown a.o. in the local pinacothecas of the smaller hill villages is rather disappointing and not really worth the trip unless you are fanatically obsessed with medieval and early renaissance art and want to see every scrap that is available.

   What is really lacking in these guides is a rating system that makes Michelin Guides so useful for planning excursions, because it would allow you to weigh more or less objectively the different options that are open to you. The Michelin Guide for Italy is however totally insufficient if you want to focus your visit exclusively on Umbria and want to see more than Assisi, Orvieto and Perugia.




4. If you want a book with photos, choose an EyeWitness guidebook. If you want to reseach places to stay, purchase a Karen Brown guide to inns or hotels. But for in-depth information that focuses on the history, culture and arts in Umbria, Blue Guide Umbria is the best there is.
   
   I lived in Perugia (the largest town in Umbria) for three months during which I traveled extensively throughout the region. The Blue Guide for Umbria was by far the most useful and most accurate of the 4 guide books I brought with me. Frankly,I should have left the rest at home.
   
   While I wouldn't recommend Blue Guide Umbria for researching hotels, you can't go wrong with the ones listed. The restaurant lists are more than adequate and cover all price ranges. Most importantly, however, the hotels and restaurants listed are very appropriately categorized and rated (both in terms of cost and quality).
   
   What I liked most about Blue Guide Umbria was being able to tell which towns, churches, museums and historical sites would really interest me and which would not. Most guides make every site and town seem spectacular. The Blue Guide Umbria was more discerning than most. The book also contained fairly complete and accurate information about the layout and content of churches and museums. For the traveler who wants to pack light but be well-informed, Blue Guide Umbria is a treasure.