Customer Reviews

The Rough Guide to Italy 9 (Rough Guide Travel Guides)

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

 

 

The Rough Guide is the way to go for touring and paying fair prices for what you get. Make sure to buy the most recent year and you'll be good to go. (and reserve way ahead of time in Italy especially in Venice, Florence!) The hotel and restaurant recommendations are reliable. The sometimes not-so-politically correct histories within are amusing enough to read the book cover-to-cover. Plus if a place is lousy they tell you not to waste your time instead of sending you there as a plug to sell the guide. Other guides sing praises about places you go to that are trash heaps filled with other tourists that have apparently read the same misinformed guide! Yes because it is a guide and reality changes faster than print: very, very rarely you will find something out-of-date or be disappointed by a recommendation. But less so with Rough Guides.
I've tried them all. The competition is not worth considering as they are almost always outdated or so limited to one set itinerary. Frommer's = way too expensive for what you get : hotels, restaurants for rich American tourists. Let's Go = hohum, many establishments do not still exist and if they do you'll be disappointed! (Best pizza in Parma = inedible) Lonely Planet = inspiring photos but lacking substance. Rick Steve's = ridiculous inaccurate hand-drawn maps and the one proscribed itinerary to visit an entire country.
Go Rough Guide. No regrets.
PS If you are planning on driving in Europe consider taking a GPS unit with you that has European maps and POI (point of interests) in it to alleviate stress and promote family accord. This is especially important when entering foreign cities. Using the GPS you can select a parking garage near the hotel (if none at hotel) before arrival, safely navigate there, park the car, and hoof the rest of the way on foot. Don't make the same mistake I did in Siena!

I have no qualms with the book itself, but should be sold at a steep discount in Kindle format because it's very hard to use. Main my complaints are...

1) The maps are absolutely unreadable, even with the recent upgrades to Kindle that allow image zooming. These are clearly low-res images, and this needs to be fixed.

2) The Table of Contents is very poor. Especially for the electronic version, there should be much more detail. Each section really should have its own Table of Contents. The only way to make this usable is to set a *lot* of bookmarks in advance. Particularly on the iPhone, it's hard to page through the book looking for what you want.

3) The poor Table of Contents might not have been so slow if the search had not been so bad. You have to wait up to 10 minutes to complete a search. That's really a joke. Kindle really has to up its game on searching.

I look forward to the day when these issues are resolved. It's really nice to not drag around a book on trips --- so much easier to just carry your favorite Kindle appliance (in my case, an iPhone).

I went with a friend and we used this and rough guides and they helped alot

Rough Guides are the best guides out there for travel. This updated version was a great gift for family members planning a trip for June 2010.

I thought I was going to get something new same old thing...I got the French Hotels and restaurant guide which was great....cheap places to eat and sleep//not in this book a few good web sites which Ill have to use to get the real info..