No comments about Frommer's Tuscany and Umbria With Your Family: From Renaissance Architecture to Stunning Scenery (Frommers With Your Family Series).

No comments about Italy by Train: 50 Unforgettable Trips and All the Sights Along the Way (Italy By Train).

No comments about Old Italy: Where to Go and What to See 400 Years Ago.

2 comments about Adriatic Pilot.

1. My trip is not for another three weeks (May 07) - so i'll update this review after that. But flipping through it now -it looks good.
   
   This is s recent edition - and i've been told the croatian coast is developing fast that older pilots arent as good.
   
   It's in colour too - which is a lot nicer than another I bought that is all black and white. My girlfriend wishes it had restaurant reviews!! ha - a new area for pilots??!
   
   I'll update this in april - but right now it looks great!



2. I bought this Pilot book for a charter in Croatia from Split to Dubrovnik. Since we basically organized a complete do-it-yourself charter (no real charter agency), this Guide was pretty useful for helping us plan our trip. We weren't sure what sort of charts/guidebooks would be available with our yacht and were glad that we had read the Pilot before setting out. It has good information on local winds (boras) and some of the customs. The sketch charts of the harbors and anchorages were also useful. The yacht actually was equipped with a second pilot book as well as charts (in English) - but it was nice to cross-reference between the books as we planned our trips. It was fantastic... Now, on to Montenegro someday...

No comments about The Sunny Side of the Alps: Year-Round Delights in South Tyrol and the Dolomites.

5 comments about No Picnic on Mount Kenya: A Daring Excape, A Perilous Climb.

1. I'm a big fan of WWII prisoner of war tales, both real (The Long Walk, Ghost Soldiers, et al) and fictional (King Rat, Bridge on the River Kwai, et al), so I was intrigued by this account by an Italian of how he and two companions escaped their POW camp, climbed Mt. Kenya, and then snuck back into camp several weeks later. Unfortunately, while their adventure was undoubtedly remarkable, it never really comes alive in Benuzzi's book. I suspect much of the problem for me is that I know nothing about mountaineering and don't particularly find it interesting. The other difficulty I had was with the flatness of the prose, whether this is due to a weak translation or to Benuzzi's writing in a foreign language I don't know, but in any event, I found it rather tepid. So while I think the whole idea of his adventure is wonderful and in rather brilliant dark humor, I didn't find the telling equally so.



2. This book is a welcome change from all the peak bagging, egoistical, mountain-conquering books out there. The author talks so poetically about the beauty of the mountain , that its hard to remain unaffected. Their mission is extremely pure and simple - to climb Mt. Kenya, although some people might say that it was an irresponsible thing to do in the middle of war .... The truth is that its a fantastic description of their whole adventure, with graphic descriptions of the jungle and how they made it with POW rations and home-made climbing gear. A true mountaineering classic !



3. I really enjoyed this book. It sounds almost whimsical that POWs would go to all this trouble and face considerable personal danger to escape, climb a mountain, and then go right back to the prison camp, but the way Benuzzi describes it, it makes a certain sense. The painstaking process of preparing for the trip - which included all the risks and difficulties of a "typical" prison break plus the demands of an Alpine climb - is told in a matter-of-fact, rather dry fashion. (On nominating the third man for the party: "He had never climbed a mountain in his life. The only reason why we decided to try him was because he was universally thought to be mad as a hatter, and mad people were what we needed.") Benuzzi's descriptions of the scenes on the way up the mountain are glorious, and of the return to camp are funny and quite touching. A very enjoyable pocket-adventure story that deserves to be better known.



4. I enjoy escape stories & the first half of this book was a typical WW2 escape story. The story has humour throughout & their task - to climb Mount Kenya - was quite an undertaking. What I liked best was the author's personality / humour & seeing things from an Italian and African perspective. His descriptions of the types of people in the prison camp are awesome. Day to day camp life is well described also.
   
   I think it took great guts to attempt what they did but to me the scariest parts were sleeping in the jungle with little or no shelter & no weapons. Who know's what type of beasts they may come across? I felt the second half of the book which describes more of the climb itself was more boring. When I got into this part I was mostly looking forward to finishing the book & getting onto something else. It is unique & I don't think in all the escape books I have read anyone has ever had their main intention be to escape back into their camp. That took a little bit of the interest away for me.
   
   It is a good story & I think the author would be a very interesting person to meet but the book was just middle of the road as far as true adventure stories I have read.



5. Felice Benuzzi wound up in a Second World War POW camp close to the foot of Mount Kenya, a mountain that is higher than the highest alp in Europe. Prison camps are boring; soon Benuzzi, who went on to become an ambassador in post-war Italy's diplomatic service, was dreaming of scaling the mountain he saw beyond the barbed wire of his confines.
   
   Eventually he did break out, and with the help of two fellow prisoners and rudimentary mountain climbing equipment they had made in the prison camp, he and a fellow prisoner ascended one of Mount Kenya's peaks, where they planted an Italian flag. A great story of adventure and humanity that loses a little of its lyricism in its translation into English. Great reading for all ages.

2 comments about Italian Backgrounds (Classic Books on Cassettes Collection) [UNABRIDGED] (Classic Books on Cassettes Collection).

1. "Italian Backgrounds" by Edith Wharton is a somewhat charming travel book (a quick read) about her time in Italy as its veteran traveler. The piece is not written in a narrative, but is rather more thematically arranged. Wharton doesn't write about the Doges Palace or the Duomo, her milieu is the deeper background of the dedicated traveler.

   The title comes from her theme derived from an analogy that traveling in Italy involves various areas of a painting. Italian paintings, she writes, have fore- middle- and backgrounds. The two-or three-day tourist in Venice spends all his or her time in the foreground, traipsing the well-established routes and keeping to the guidebooks. If one has more time, one can go farther into the "painting" by discovering more, and, of course, finally, as Wharton herself has done, one can dwell in the backgrounds, knowing the country well, understanding all its eras and its different brands of beauty.

   Wharton is a harsh art critic, and much of the book deals with her assessments of lesser known (to me as the foreground tourist of Italy) artists and their works. My favorite chapter retold the story of her identifying some mislabeled statuary in Tuscany as belonging to a different artist and era altogether.

   It was pleasant to read. For me, I am a fan of Wharton, so enjoyed this look into her experiences and the life of her mind.




2. Italian Backgrounds is comprised of nine, loosely coupled travel essays written by Edith Wharton over a four year period (1901-1904). Few readers are likely to possess her remarkable knowledge of Italian paintings, murals, frescoes, sculpture, and architecture, and in the hands of a lesser writer, these essays might easily have become tedious and overly detailed. Wharton's essays achieve a singular balance between scholarly analysis and captivating memoir.
   
   Italian Backgrounds begins not in Italy, but at a small alpine posting-inn in Switzerland close to the Italian border. She contrasts a picturesque "toy chalet, with its air of self-conscious neatness" with the untidiness of nearby Italian villages. Despite this negative comparison, with little effort Wharton convinces us that we must take the dusty, windy road downward into that land where church steeples become campanili, liberated vines wrap themselves around mulberry trees, and far off across the hot plains domes and spires, painted walls, and sculptured alters await us.
   
   Italian Backgrounds is not a conventional travel book. Edith Wharton's discursive essays are not arranged geographically, nor chronologically. The chapters could be read in any sequence with little loss of continuity. They might compare favorably with an extensive mural, one that draws your attention first here, then there, then elsewhere.
   
   Despite the passage of 100 years, Italian Backgrounds should be mandatory reading to anyone planning to visit Italy, especially those with aspirations to write travel essays. Likewise, Italian Backgrounds would be ideal supplementary reading for a general art appreciation class, as well as targeted reading for art and history majors.
   
   The chapters are titled An Alpine Posting-Inn, A Midsummer Week's Dream, The Sanctuaries of the Pennine Alps, What the Hermits Saw, A Tuscan Shrine, Sub Umbra Liliorum, March in Italy, Picturesque Milan, and Italian Backgrounds.
   
   Ecco Travels specializes in re-publishing rare and hard-to-obtain travel writings by exceptional authors like Henry James, Charles Dickens, Andre Gide, Freya Stark, Augustus Hare, Aldous Huxley, V. S. Pritchett, Evelyn Waugh, and Edith Wharton.

No comments about AAA Italy TravelBook, 4th Edition (Aaa Italy Travelbook).

1 comments about Rome and the Vatican Travel Pack (Globetrotter Travel Packs).

1. This is a great buy. This travel guide is complete, well illustrated with color photos and maps, an okay index, and it comes with a separate Rome and the Vatican travel map. About every two pages there is a small color map of the area relevant to those pages. Map and travel guide are compact and in a clever transparent jacket.

No comments about Venice, Italy Street Map.