Customer Reviews

Rick Steves' Florence & Tuscany 2010

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Just back from a week in Italy. So glad I bought and read this book before the trip. So helpful with information about reservations needed for some sites (which the professor leading our tour was clueless about), and great tips on eating and shopping. Podcasts we downloaded off his website were great. highly recommended!

Very good guidebook. Practical information. Not too big - easy to take on a trip.
The best book I have found - and I have looked at a least 5 others.

I used the guided tours in this book for 4 different museums in Florence. They really enhanced the experience. I also saw other tourist using this book also in the museums.

We used Rick Steves' books throughout our entire tour of Italy and will use him for wherever we travel going forward!

As a lover of Steve's television shows, I was very disappointed with the Kindle for iPad version of the book. While the content is good, when I saw it advertised as a "multimedia version", I expected integration of some really compelling video content. This is NOT the case. There are illustrations, maps, etc. But I have not encountered any compelling integration of video which could really make the book come alive. In addition, many of the illustrations are simply really bad scans of the book's illustrations. Given Rick's foot in each of the worlds of print and television, I was hoping this would be a visionary example of the integration of text and media in a genre of publishing that could really benefit from that integration. It is not.

I purchased this book along with Rick Steves Venice and Rome for a trip I was planning to Italy. I have to admit that we would have been totally lost without having these books. Not only is the books full of useful maps, ticketing information, restaurants and prices, but it also contains suggestions for tours of museums and self walking tours. I used all three of this travel guides when we were in the cities and I read them all in depth before we left. Since we planned out everything before we went and did most of the museum tours on our own I felt like we were well prepared with these books. All of the travel tips alone are excellent and I enjoyed going to some of the restaurants suggested in the books. I can not count all the times we were stopped in different museums in Florence and Venice and asked by different people traveling where we had gotten these books. I will never plan a trip without purchasing a Rick Steves Travel Guide book again.

This is a great book to acquire before going to help in the planning phase prior to arrival. But it is also equally valuable and convenient to have along during your trip. Rick Steves help travelers to prioritize and also experience the culture.

My wife bought the ebook file for Kindle to plan a trip to Tuscany, and it definitely has a lot of detail, history, and personal notes. The latter was worth it, as you know a bit more what to expect when you get there.

I just returned from a 2 week trip in Tuscany and this book was priceless! Solid information of parking information and details for a lot of the hill towns in Tuscany and great info on eating out and sleeping. The short Italian phrases section in the back was also a lifesaver.

I had not travled overseas in many years and I found this guide to be very helpful. The Rick Steve's books are more highly detailed about specifc tourist sights than the Fodor's book I bought. I found the two books to be complementary to each other. The restaurant recommendations are quite different between the two books. The best thing about this book is the level of detail that is put into the book about HOW to be a tourist. For example, the section about how to purchase tickets for the Uffizi Gallery saved me many headaches as there are many different lines of people when you show up at the gallery. Also, the guide has many notes and comments in the walking tours for the top attractions, which the Fodor's guide does not supply. We tried several restuarants from the guide and found some to be great and others to be mediocre, but that is perhaps personal taste. Overall, an excellent guide.