Customer Reviews

Fodor's Venice's 25 Best, 7th Edition (Full-color Travel Guide)

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I travel quite a bit for my job and I am always on the lookout for guidebooks that are better than the run of the mill overly loaded ones that have so much info that you can't really digest it all. I'm usually in a country for 2 to 3 weeks working so I only have my nights and weekends free. These little Fodors guides are great to focus you on what you should definitely check out. Even if you are touring for a week at a time they have great examples of 2 day walk throughs of a city, multiple one's so you can pick and choose depending on your mood.

Likewise, the handy maps always help. I used one of these for Rome, Florence and Venice without fail. Great way to go!

For our recent trip to Italy we looked at numerous travel guides and we bought the Foder 25 Best Guides for Rome, Florence and Venice. They were a terrific resource both before and during the trip. Their compact size is comfortable in a backpack or purse allowing you to keep them with you all the time. They give concise descriptions of the various neighborhoods/sections of the cities, what to see, and how to move around. The restaurant recommendations were very helpful but the cost descriptions were not always accurate. The best feature for me were the fold-up laminated maps. We walked everywhere and they saved us time and effort and made it much easier to make sure we saw everything on our list. I highly recommend these guides.

My husband and I love to travel independently. We like Fodor's book in general; two books of "25 Best" (Milan and Venice), that we bought for our Italy trip last year, were indispensible. They provided enough information without overwhelming us with details and helped to see many attractions. In Milan, for example, it helped to know a name of the subway (metro) station, time when each museum is opened, even when admission is free : ). I highly recommend to everyone to buy this book before going to Italy.

I hope Fodor will publish such kind of books for other important cities to visit like Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Cape Town, Athens, etc.

One additional comment: be aware of the commissions' rate when you exchange money in Italy. The best way is to take money from the ATM machine. Some companies (especially in Milan) charges up to 20% in commission's fee plus about $7 per transaction. Unfortunately this information is missing in the book.