Customer Reviews

Lonely Planet Italy (Country Guide)

5 star:		(44)
4 star:		(23)
3 star:		(15)
2 star:		(10)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

I've been to Italy several times.....Rome, Venice, Florence, Bologna, Milan, some of the hill towns, etc (most recently last April). Here are my reviews of the best guides to meet your 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!

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more concise (depending on what the guide is known for), if your main concern is that the guide has very little old or outdated information, then this would be a good guide for you.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.

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

I studied for 3 months in Rome in 1999. The 3rd edition of the Italy guide was the defacto bible for travel from Sicilia to the Dolomites. Of course Venice, Florence, Pisa and Rome are covered, but how about Cortona, Siena, Poggibonisi, Assizi, Orvieto, Enna, Catania, Vulcanis, Bari, Lecce, Positano, Siracusa? How to get there, what to see, what to expect in these hill towns and costal villages? If I got there could I get back to Rome by Monday's morning classes? No other single travel book is filled with all the information found in the Italy guide.

As an example, one weekend I told my roomates that I wanted to go to San Marino because according to the guide I could get my passport stamped with entry to a country within a country. Also it mentioned "spactacular views". Nothing prepared us for what we saw, a fortress castle hewn into the 2000+ ft cliffs and a city in the clouds overlooking a vast plain of farms and towns!

I traveled in Italy from Feb 3 to April 5, 2001 and I took both this book, LP, and Let's Go Italy (LG). LG gets the nod for layout. It's very clear and user friendly. You can find what you are looking for quickly. LP's double column layout is densely packed with information but is often confusing. In LG, at the beginning of the treatment of a new place, they tell you how to get there and away to and from all of the likely places. They tell you how many trains and buses there are. This feature was very helpful in planning my itinerary. Just ask fellow travellers where they've been that was good and LG tells you how to get there. LP on the other hand buries transportation info at the back of each place and it is often skeletal or misleading. The writing style I found to be very uninspired, so much so that I suspect that the author didn't bother to go to many of the places. That would account for why their street directions are so poor, but I didn't think much of LG.s either. (I have to admit that I'm not as good as some at figuring out the streets of a new town.) Lp often ignores seasonal changes in timetables too. If your travelling in winter, you're out of luck. However, I got tired of the LG writing style. Whereas LP gives you the historical facts about a place, LG's Harvard University student writers would rather be cute than accurate. Also, LP simply covers more places than LG. Another plus for LP is that in the opening secton of the book they give extensive info about how the country works. Post offices, police attitudes, etc. LP tells you in chich places you should keep your credit cards, passport, etc. in your trousers while LG's introductory section is a little paranoid. For example, "Don't ever tell anyone you are travelling alone." Geez you guys, Italy is safer than Boston. While LG gives more youth hostel info, because it is more budget oriented than LP, LG's impressionable writers gush about every hotel they stayed in. Any room with a window has a spectacular view. One more thing - if you are traveling by car, you need LP. LG gives no street or parking info. In conclusion, LG is better for itinerary planning and is easier to read, while LP's 800+ pages simply give you more information, although it is harder to sift through. After about 6 weeks, I gave away LG and used LP. My pack was getting heavy.

I just returned from a wonderful vacation trough Italy visiting Roma, Pisa, Firenze, Venezia, Siena, and Orvieto. The Lonely Planet Italy guide provided very useful information such as history, places to stay and eat, and other up to date pertinent information on each of these places (and more).

The Lonely Planet Italy guide is medium sized and is not heavy. It fits easily on a hand bag. This book is easy to use and understand. It is organized by region, and then by town. Each regional map highlights the most important tourist attractions.

The first two chapters: Facts about Italy and Facts for the Visitors; cover Italian culture, history, and local customs, and many valuable hints for the traveller. Reading this two chapters before leaving help us to prepare and plan our trip.

This book enhanced our travel experience 100%!

We visited about eleven cities in northern and central Italy and we carried both the Lonely Planet Italy and the Rough Guide Italy with us. I had the Rough Guide Italy and had no problems looking up information. My companion had the Lonely Planet Italy and she eventually gave up on it. She found the LP to be lacking in basic information and basically a book better left at home. We would recommend the Rough Guide instead.

Lonely Planet Italy (3rd Edition) is definitely the book to get for a tight budget tour of Italy. I went on a round trip tour, starting from Milan, to Verona, Venice, Bologna, Florence, Rome, Pisa, Beaches on the West Coast and back Milan, simply based on the book. <grin> And the most interesting part got to be that I spend a total of not more than £300, having visited most of the places featured in Lonely Planet <Big GRIN>. The advices on safety given in the book might be a little over the top, but back to think of it, it's worth the precautions.... <smile> Love it Cheap.

I've traveled with the 3rd edition of this guide in 97 through Naples, Rome, Florence, Siena, Venice & Verona. The guide was a trustworthy companion, especially the "where to eat" section. In Italy, because of the huge number of tourists that travel to this country, many restaurants are tourist traps - expensive & mediocre. However, you can found authentic & cheap restaurants in this guide, as well as more up-market places. If you search where to eat, first find if there are restaurants recomnded by the LP in your vicinity. I even marked the locations of these restaurants on the city maps I had, so I won't need to carry the guide (which is quite big) whenever I go out at evening.

We just returned from a 10-day trip to Italy, mostly in Florence, Rome, and Milan. We carried both Lonely Planet Italy and DK Travel's EyeWitness Italy. Even though I've been a Lonely Planet devotee for years, I was very disappointed with Lonely Planet Italy.

Good points:

- Lonely Planet is GREAT for getting around. It has fantastic details on how to get from place to place. Even though we were flying in and out of lesser-known airports, the information we needed was there. Also, the Lonely Planet info made it a breeze to plan day trips to some of the smaller cities.

- Great tips! I think this is the biggest saving grace of Lonely Planet Italy. There were some fantastic tips for beating the crowds. In addition to information about advance bookings for museums (both in and outside of Italy), there was some great advice for avoiding queues at other major sights. This was especially helpful travelling during the super-crowded Easter holiday!

- Interesting Trivia. The one area of content that I actually picked up the Lonely Planet book to read was the little boxes of trivia. Things like a short history of Michelangelo's disagreements with the Popes. Most of these are usually fun and interesting to read.

- Lots of things to do! There were lots more listings in the Lonely Planet book compared to our Eyewitness.

- Extensive Hotel and Restarant Listings. The hotel listings are fine if you don't have another way to research them, but with so many great travel sites with candid traveller reviews, this doesn't make so much of a difference anymore. The restaurant listings are still helpful.

- Listings with admission fees. Our other guide mentioned in their listings if there were admission fees at places, but they didn't give the amount. It was nice to check Lonely Planet and know just how much things would cost, since some of the museums are not cheap!

- Lots of websites. I do most of my travel planning online before I leave, so I appreciated having the URLs for everything from hotels to museums to transportation.


Bad points:

- Crazy Itineraries. One thing I've always liked about the Lonely Planet books is the suggested itineraries like "Rome in 5 days." In the Italy book, this was only provided for Rome, which was disappointing, but the itineraries themselves were insane! There's actually a 2-day itinerary that covers almost ALL of Rome, which would be great for a whirlwind tour. The problem is that the longer itineraries were simply to finish the 2-day whirlwind and then see some more obscure sights. It seems that a better option would be to spend more time at the places visited in the 2-day trip. For example, explore some of the great museums that are in some of the areas glossed over by the 2-day plan.

- Absolutely no ratings of listed attractions. The problem with listing so many things to do is that you have no idea which ones you should actually do! I've found this to be a general problem in the Lonely Planet series. In more than one case, we've gone to see something after reading an interesting description in our LP guide, only to find that it's actually pretty boring, and the ONLY interesting points were the ones mentioned in the book. Eyewitness had a "Star Sight" system to mark their highest suggestions, and we absolutely loved this.

- Not enough descriptions or explanations. For example, the Lonely Planet description of the Roman Forums is something like, "To the left was the Temple of So-and-So. Across from that are the remains of the columns that formed the Such-and-Such." Unfortunately, it never explains anything about Such-and-Such or So-and-So, or why they were important. So you really have no idea what you're actually seeing (except the name).

- Too hard to follow. I've accepted this for years, because Lonely Planet keeps the book costs down by printing mostly black and white text, but in some places, it's just too hard to describe where something is. It's too hard to walk through a city square and try to read the prose descriptions of what's around you, especially when it's decorated with a the small literary flourishes that adorned the descriptions in this guide.


Overall, I feel that I just wouldn't have gotten as much out of the trip with only the Lonely Planet book. It's great for the logistics of travelling, but once we'd reached our destination, it wasn't very helpful at all. I highly recommend the Eyewitness guide if you want to learn more about Italy while you're there: Italy (Eyewitness Travel Guides)

We traveled in Italy in March 2000 and had the time of our lives. The only grouse I had was that the 4th Edition of LP Italy was not out yet. We took along Fodor's 2000 Guide but relied more on LP's older edition throughout the journey. LP is definitely wordy, but it's worth the read. Plan early--don't leave the reading to the flight to Rome, especially if you have no clue what you want to see/do.

I own about 20 Lonely Planet guides and am a real fan.
This is probably the most disappointing one to date.
The info seems to be all over the place, sometimes completely wrong or the opposite of what you would expect : A luxury complex in the book was a real dump in reality, a palace not worth while, was probably the best thing we saw on our 10 day trip.
Complete "must see" places are missing and others who LP claims to be "must see" were not that great, so overall the weakest LP guide I've read and used so far.
They should start this one from scratch