Customer Reviews

Rick Steves' Florence 2002

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(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!

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more concise (depending on what the guide is known for), if your main concern is that the guide has very little old or outdated information, then this would be a good guide for you.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

We just returned from 10 days in Tuscany. I bought this book and also Rick Steeves Italy book. While the Florence Tuscany book has more specific information I found myself looking to other guides for more. The maps are hard to read because they are hand drawn and not very detailed. We were there to explore the wine regions and there just wasn't much information about it. Surprising since that is what the majority of the area is. Also, don't let Steves scare you away from Pisa. We didn't find traffic and parking to be a problem at all. I'm glad we didn't follow his advice. The one recommendation that turned out to be the highlight of our trip was Lucca. His suggestion to rent bikes and bike the ramparts was great! For everything else, fortunatley, our villa we had a Frommer's Italy 2003 guide. It turned out to be a much better resource for what we were looking for.

We just got back from a trip to Lucca, Pisa, Florence, and Siena and we used this book to plan most of the trip. Wow, Rick was almost invariably smack-on on everything. Of the hotels we stayed in, all were from his recommendations and only one of them was unsatisfactory. (Two of the others were terrific.) The restaurants he suggested were all great and his guide to the sights helped us enormously.
If you're going to Tuscany, you should really invest in this book. You'll be glad that you did.

Although I thought this book was "ok" I couldn't help but feel that this book was written more to increase the number of books Rick is selling, rather than to fill a need for this type of book.

I was also surprized to find Rick, early in the book, slamming the Eyewitness Guidebooks. His books we are told, are all one requires, and that you should "borrow" an Eyewitness book from those you might bump into on vacation, if you want.

On the good side, however, there was museum information in this book that was very useful.

We just got back from a week in Tuscany. We used several restaurant reviews, two lodging reviews and several museum tours. In our experience the information and maps were very accurate and concise.

This book helped me plan my days in Florence in November, 2003, very effectively. The information on museum days/times was invaluable, although the prices are a little out of date (on the low side). The suggestions for how to see Florence in so many days were also very helpful. And I found the book's tours of major sights to be extremely helpful: there is so much to see in Florence that it is easy to run out of time without help such as this book provided.

I can't speak to the hotel recommendations, however, as I used TravelAdvisor to help select a hotel. I found the restaurant recommendations and walking tours helpful, too. You will want to have a more-detailed map of Florence, however, and your hotel can probably provide a good one for free.

I also took the Rick Steves Italian phrasebook and recommend it highly. I bought both books from Amazon.