No comments about AAA Essential Italian Lakes, 6th Edition (Aaa Essential Italian Lakes).

No comments about Buying a Home in Italy, 4th Edition: A Survival Handbook (Buying a Home in Italy).

4 comments about Knopf Guide: Naples and Pompeii (Knopf Guides).

1. Informative and insightful. Excellent walking tours, important facts and historical backgound. Many good perspectives from writers and artists. This has been our "go to" book when we explore Naples. (We have lived in Naples for a year now.) Our best pre-trip purchase. JTP



2. You'll love this book if you're the type of person that also enjoys reading National Geographic. This guide is packed with wonderful art, drawings, maps, photographs, and interesting text. It's really much more than a typical tourist guide. It helps one have deeper understanding of Napoli through an exploration of history, culture, geography, and geology. It's an especially great selection for those people planning to call Napoli home.

   RW - US Navy




3. After reading the other reviews of this book, I decided to buy it and I am glad I did. It gives a wonderful account of the history and traditions of this remarkable area. I would recommend it highly for anyone planning to stay in Naples for more than just a short vacation and for people who are just interested in learning more about not only the monuments and churches, but also the rich culture.



4. The Knopf guides series are unique. They combine colorful pictures, in-depth historical background and detailed descriptions of sightseeing attractions. They are handsomely bound on bright glossy paper. I preferred the old style of plastic semi-hard binding that has recently been phased out. There are so many great places to visit in the Bay of Naples that they couldn't cover it all and include everything but it's better than any other I've seen.

   Guides such as the Michelin Green Guides series will devote just a few paragraphs to an attraction. Such guides have the advantage of being organized in a more orderly way that's much more conducive to touring by car.You can read a few sentences about the place you are about to see before you get out of your tour bus or rental car. The Knopf guide instead would be better read at home even before taking any trip. The wise traveler would be best served by having an in-depth guide such as this or the Rough Guides series and a guide with brief descriptions like the Michelin guide.

   The Naples guide contains excellent separate sections for Pompeii (over twenty pages), Paestum, Capri and Herculaneum.
   If you are an archeology buff like me this is a great improvement over the 1 or 2 pages that other guides devote to these important but overlooked historical sites. The three delightful Greek temples at Paestum are older than the Parthenon in Athens and less than 100 miles south of Naples on a flat plain (no climbing up a hill as in Athens).

   A minor negative point is the use of drawings where photographs would have been more useful; this seems to be true for all of the Knopf guides I've seen. An aerial photograph to give the lay of the land of a city or historical site would be more useful than a drawing that is of uncertain accuracy.

2 comments about Italy, 5th (Country & Regional Guides - Cadogan).

1. Although this book is a good basic overview of travel in Italy, it is written in an unnecessarily pedantic style. I found other travel guides on Italy to be much more reader-friendly and useful.



2. The great asset of the Cadogan series is the in-depth historical and cultural context that the authors set their desciptions in. While all of the usual nuts-and-bolts information on hotels, restaurants, nighlife, etc. is there, the emphasis is on really getting to know and appreciate the cultures you are travelling through, rather than just being able to name the Top 5 sights in each city and take home postcard shots of each. If you read this book, you'll come away with a whole new appreciation for the country and its people, and you'll understand why you've decided to travel there in the first place.

3 comments about The New Italy.

1. This book gives a very comprehensive and up to date overview of what is produced today in Italy. A must have for all Italian wine lovers!



2. As difficult as it was for me to believe this, I really thought that this book would have been much more comprehensive, not just a vehicle to flatter a handfull of producers that must be current Gambero Rosso "Favoriti". I get as much, if not more, out of my quarterly subscription to the magazine. Ordinarily, I really like Daniele Cernilli's writing along with his willingness to take chances and "Tell it like it is". I wish he had done so here. The regions could have been probed much more in-depth and the producers expanded to mirror the magazine. 3 GENEROUS stars.



3. Wonderfully written and a must have for all wine lovers. I have traveled the Italian wine regions and am an enologist and this book was very well written.

   Also teaching wine educational classes, I was very impressed with the accuracy and details of the Italian wines and regions especially Tuscany and Piedmont! I will be in Italy in 2 weeks and feel like I was in Italy reading this book.

   Buy, read and sip Italian wines!!

   Thanks you Marco Sabellico and Daniele Cernilli!

   Enologist, consultant & wine educator,

   Tony Carlucci

5 comments about Mattanza: Love and Death in the Sea of Sicily.

1. This woman is a great writer. she brings you right to
   the subject at hand, this one being an ancient fishing
   rite, populated by real, breathing (sexy sometimes) men.

   You have to read the whole book too!

   amazing.




2. Sicilians perform dramatic killing rituals. Traveling lady gets down with the local men. Greed destroys nature and wrecks a proud island culture.
   Whatever way you cut it, this is a passionate jewel of a book. I can't imagine how many drafts the author wrote to distill her years of meticulous note-taking. Every chapter has a photo or drawing, a delightful touch that only suggests the thousands of such shots she must have taken.

   Maggio's sensuous observations of the island, her candid personal impressions, and her subtle political commentary will make you think -- and sweat.

   (This review refers to the earlier edition with the less hyped title.)




3. Theresa Maggio has done us a favor by providing a well-written book about a subject little-known to the English-speaking world: I refer to the mattanzas, or communal bluefin tuna kills, that have been a feature of Sicilian life for over a thousand years. In the process, she has introduced us to dozens of colorful characters and an obscure island off the northwest coast of Sicily.

   Curiously, it is the Japanese -- not the Italians -- for whom most of the tuna is reserved. They have factory ships offshore for processing the tuna into sushi and packing it to fly back home under ice. These mattanzas are intensely covered by the Japanese news media, as Ms. Maggio shows, because bluefin sushi is highly desirable, rare, and goes for astronomical prices in Tokyo.

   Over the last two or three decades, the number of tuna and their size has declined steadily. One reason is that, at the time the book was written, European fishermen had overfished the tuna using purse seines. Off the coast of North America, stricter controls are in effect to allow the species to recover.

   The process of luring the tuna into the elaborate traps for the mattanza is complex and deeply embedded in Sicilian lore. It calls for patience, strength, courage, and wiliness -- qualities which are fast disappearing as the knowledge has not been passed on due to the decreasing number of old hands available to impart the knowledge.

   The only failure of the book is not the author's, but the publisher's. Explanatory photos and more schematics than the single one (in Italian) appearing on the front and rear endpapers are essential to support the text. There are some small photos that are marginally discernible, but plates would have been better. The mattanza is a complicated event, and I feel this is a serious omission. In every other way, I wholeheartedly recommend Maggio's work.




4. I picked up this book as part of my recent Mediterranean travel book kick.

   The book is more romance than reportage, as Maggio tries to capture the life, rhythm, rituals, myths, and, yes, romance of life on the island, centering her story on the fishermen who deploy the nets and traps that gather hundreds of the giant bluefins for slaughter. The tuna once made the island prosperous, but declining numbers of fish and competition from long-line trawlers has taken its toll (the island's cannery closed in 1981, throwing a thousand people out of work), and soon the ritual of the mattanza will probably disappear from Favignana, leaving pretty much nothing but tourism behind.

   (As a reader in Tokyo, I was surprised to see a Japan connection: it's Japan's voracious appetite for sashimi that's helping keep the mattanza going: when the bluefin tuna are slaughtered, the Japanese are waiting to send them off to the tuna auction at giant Tsukiji Wholesale Market in Tokyo. Maggio includes a rather over-the-top chapter about Japanese sushi, exaggerating (in my opinion) the ritual and price of sushi: she quotes 10-year-old Bubble-Era prices for tuna (in 1992, she says, a 715-pound bluefin was sold for $83,500, or about $117 a pound) and extrapolates from that, despite the fact that the average price is a very small fraction of that peak.

   (The kind of highly stylized sushi places she describes, where they sell toro for $75 a plate, are places I've never set foot in and probably never will: I go to the far more common, far more plebian "kaiten zushi" (conveyor belt sushi) restaurants, where I can snarf down maguro and toro for about $1 to 2 a plate. Sure, the fish isn't the highest quality, the atmosphere is utilitarian, and the wasabi is reconstituted from powder, but it's still tasty and, I think, a more usual experience than the romantic and ritualistic kind Maggio describes.)

   But I like the book, I must say. Maybe I'll tackle the Lawrence Durell book on Corfu on my shelf next.




5. What a pity this books seems to have dropped from print. Forget Mayle and Mayes with their renovated houses and expensive habits, and gushing nonsense. This is the real Mediterranean, where people are proud but poor (Stendhal says that Italians have no shame about poverty) and attempt to hold on to their centuries-old traditions in the face of declining fishing stocks and changing economic circumstances. Maggio's book is a wonderful testament to these noble men who love their life in spite of its precarious nature--the perfect foil for having to deal with boring MTV-types.

No comments about Italy: A Traveler's Literary Companion.

No comments about Walking the Alpine Parks of France & Northwest Italy.

5 comments about Italy Fever: 14 Ways to Satisfy Your Love Affair with Italy.

1. This slim volume should have been a nice little personal website and I suppose makes a nice gift for the right person but is not much of a book. There is something embarassingly amateurish about the book that nearly raises it to the level of camp. The author has never lived in Italy, does not speak the language, doesn't seem to know any Italians personally, and does not appear to have ever experienced the most obvious way to "satisfy your love affair with Italy" (or if she has, doesn't want her husband to know about it).

   Italophiles who don't really know the country might enjoy this book. It is not exactly harmful, and in its own naive way rather charming and entertaining. It is fun for example, to see which "Italian" movies immediately come to mind but don't make her list ("Miracle in Milan" and "The Comfort of Strangers" are two that I don't see her mention).




2. This book was an absolute waste of time and , ... also a waste of money. My husband bought it for me as a gift. This is the only reason I felt compelled to read the book. The author drones painfully on and on about her husband's packing problems and bike fetishes. There is very little useful or interesting information about Italy in this book. For those of you who have been to Italy there is NO reason to read this book. For those of you planning a trip for the first time , please read something else. This book is not well written, offers the reader nothing and is a total waste of time!!!



3. How did I miss Italy Fever until today? As a feverish Italophile/bibliophile myself, I have an extensive collection of books on Italian history, travel, cookery, and fiction. Darlene Marwitz is my newest "find", a must-have reference. As a frequent traveler to Italy from Bergamo to Roma and all wonders inbetween, I either own or have evaluated every possible source to plan my trips and further my romance with this land and its people. Having been a mental traveler long before a realized one, I commend Marwitz for her finely honed lists on travel through books and films.

   The reason I neglected to discover Italy Fever sooner could be my immersion in such pursuits as organizing my next trip, struggling with Italian language course, serving up Florentine timballo di maccheroni, hasseling everyone to "go there," faxing and phoning Italian friends and baking too many foccace. Darlene would approve, she outlines all such pursuits in her book and many more with an irrepressible style and a bubbling sense of humor, all founded on scholarly knowledge. She has done her homework. Remember the words of St. Catherine of Siena: "The more you know, the more you love, and by loving more, the more you enjoy."

   This author could have been me. I have experienced all of her passionate revelations. Like her, "I like details not found in typical publications . . .I want to read about and travel to places where sightseers seldom wander, locations best discovered by accident." Recalling the afternoon I drove on up a narrow lane after failing to find the villa of Iris Origo, pulled to the edge to turn around and found myself at the tall iron gates of her family burial ground and chapel. Inscribed on her tombstone is the quote from St. Catherine.




4. Having Italian ancestry, I have grown up with so many stories and pictures of Italy, and the relatives that my grandparents left behind to come to America for a better life. Darlene's book was wonderful...to ready over a cup of tea and dream about the day when my husband and I will visit Italy. And I had to laugh out loud so many times, as she tried convince her husband that he, too, had a love affair with Italy! I've been trying to do that for several years, and I've heard my husband utter the same words that Darlene's husband did on many occasions! I know that someday I'll get my trip to Italy, and my husband will try to be enthusiastic about it...we'll see how that goes! But in the mean time, Darlene's book has given me so much pleasure and to know that others share my passion of Italy is wonderful!



5. Whether you are in love with Italy, an ardent traveller or an armchair traveller you will not fail to be totally caught in Darlene Marwitz's love affair with, and enthusiasm for, Italy.
   I cannot recommend this book highly enough. It made me smile, it made me long for long hot summer days and warm evenings, it made me want to hop on the next flight to Pisa! This is not just a travel book either, it made me smile when I read Darlene's attempts at drumming up enthusiasm for her husband to travel also - now THAT I could sympathise with. A must!

No comments about The Rough Guides' Rome Directions 2 (Rough Guide Directions).