Customer Reviews

The Rough Guide to the Italian Lakes (Rough Guide Travel Guides)

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I researched our trip last month to the Italian Lakes and found this to be the best guide available with lots of detail on the best places to visit. It includes Lake Lugano in Switzerland which is just a fairly short drive from Menaggio on Lake Como. Highlights of our trip were staying in a lakefront room at the Hotel Royal in Stresa which was not terribly expensive and had a very nice view of islands and no noise from the trains nearby), a beautiful drive up to the Madonna del Sasso church on the western side of Lake Orta with the most spectacular view of the Isola San Giulio, a lovely boat tour around Lake Lugano with great views of Morcote and other villages, the gardens at Villa Taranto, and nice romantic dinners lakeside in Ascona and Orta. We also drove through the Centovalli region on our own but think the Lago Maggiore Express (combo boat and train rides) would be a wonderful way to do that trip. Other books I found useful were Frommer's Northern Italy's Best Loved Driving Tours (since we had a car), and Rick Steve's Italy.

I usually prefer Rough Guides to other travel guides. But the Italian Lakes edition skips over a large part of what it's supposed to cover. And important information is too often missing. For example, we recently travelled to Menaggio on Lake Como. The book mentions that the town has a beach. It does, but it's on the far end of town, and it charges nearly 10 euro a head to use it. They might want to mention that...

It's not a bad book, and it does manage to touch on most towns on the lakes. But when a guide claims to concentrate on a particular area, then it should be a bit more comprehensive.

I wanted a guide for a week stay in the Lake Como area. The "Rough Guide" was one of three guidebooks I purchased. All three were generally disappointing, although relatively speaking the "Rough Guide" was the best of the lot. As with the other two, the coverage is broader than I needed. This would be fine if the coverage of the Lake Como area itself was thorough and helpful. In this category, the "Rough Guide" proved to stand out among the three books, although I still would expect coverage to be more thorough. For all three guides coverage of the central tourist areas of Lake Como, (Bellagio, Ravenna & Tremezzo) tended to be superficial, but less so for the "Rough Guide". But in both lodging and restaurant recommendations "Rough Guide" is as weak as the the other two. Lodging recommendations seemed spotty and incomplete and the restaurant recommendations were very disappointing For the most part, the named restaurants were generally mediocre. There are excellent choices in the area. But the leads came not from these guides but from TripAdvisor. And almost all of these excellent restaurants didn't earn a mention in any of these guides. Makes one wonder what the criteria is for inclusion in these guides.

There is no other place like the Northern Lakes, and no other book can guide you so smoothly across the beautiful waters and into the perfect magical Port that surround the Lakes.