Blue Guide Central Italy with Rome and Florence

As always the Blue Guides are the best for art history, general history and even the restaurent recs are not that bad! For reference, I have been to Venice several times and I always refer to this great book!

The other reviews here are for the Blue Guide to Tuscany; this review is for the new edition, which is a guide to central Italy (Tuscany, Umbria, the Marche, Lazio) plus Rome and Florence. As such, it will probably be more generally useful to travellers, as most seldom stay within a single province, and multiple guide books make travel difficult. I have always used Blue Guides - I'm one of those obsessives who actually wants to know who painted that altarpiece in a church I'm visiting or where some obscure museum is located. I have to admit that they're not for everyone, however. This could constitute too much information for many people, so be aware of how much information you like to have when you're touring. This new Blue Guide-Central Italy is much more reader friendly than the traditional Blue Guides. The print is larger (hurrah for middle-aged eyes!), color pictures are included in the text, and practical information (hotels, restaurants) is expanded. I'm not sure the latter is necessary in these days of ubiquitous internet travel sites, but I guess it's reassuring to some people. Where the Guide truly shines is in its discussion of art works. Most tourists to Italy resign themselves to looking at art, but don't have the knowledge to get much out of it. The Blue Guide gives some brief, but telling analysis of works that at least provides a starting point for understanding. So, for example, Donatello's St. George statue in the Bargello museum in Florence [p. 281]: "By endowing this remarkably well-composed statue with a sense of movement, Donatello's work represents a new departure from traditional Gothic sculpture, where the static figure was confined to its niche." The description is followed by a short text box that explains Donatello's place in Italian Renaissance art. This kind of information seems invaluable, and as long as you don't want to read a guide book cover to cover (which would be overwhelming with the Blue Guide), this book is really what you need to get the most out of a trip to central Italy.

If you really want to see Tuscany, this it: this book will take you to places you wouldn't find any other way, from charming villages that are way off the beaten track, down colorful streets and staircases to hidden piazzi that you would have walked right past, into courtyards, and out to ancient country churches with masterpieces on the altar. The Blue Guide to Tuscany is 510 pages long, plus two indexes: the author, Alta Macadam, has apparently combed every city, town and hamlet in Tuscany, traveled every road and lane, wangled her way into every locked church and described its treasures, and surveyed every provincial museum. She includes practically everything of any interest at all in the entire province of Tuscany, including the provenance of every work of art and the programs of the frescoes and carvings in every church and abbey, and notes on the contents of every museum. She gives extensive information on the architecture of Tuscany's buildings, including many floor plans, and good notes on local history. It is organized geographically, with town and city tours, and lots of maps. I heard many guides giving their talks on our visit, and very few of them had more to say about anything that Ms. Macadam or were more informative; many of the places she described exhaustively had neither guides nor tourists besides ourselves, which in Tuscany is unusual.Her directions can be a bit cryptic at times, but if you read carefully, you'll get used to them. As in all of the Blue Guides, she is prone to understatement: when, for example, speaking of the old town in Certaldo, she says that "the upper town has considerable charm", what she means is that it is ravishingly beautiful, will charm your senses and lift your spirit, and your friends and family will envy your photos and your vacation forever. Caveats: some people will find this guide to be overwhelming. Because it is so dense and exhaustive, use it to plan your trip before you leave or you'll be buried in minutiae and miss things you'll have wanted very much to see.

I just returned from a trip to Italy which included 4 days in Umbria and 8 days in Tuscany. I found the Blue Guides for both regions outstanding. Not surprisingly, both are quite worn (the best sign of a useful guidebook). What makes this guidebook stand out is the incredible breadth of coverage of all tourist sites in Tuscany, making it quite thick, but not particularly heavy. (The only guide that I have seen that even comes close in terms of coverage is the Michelin Green Guide for Tuscany.) Each chapter represents a tour which covers either a town and its vicinity or a driving circuit. Within each tour, every conceivable tourist destination is identified, including small towns, churches, squares, public buildings, museums, archeological sites, etc. For significant museums and churches, the guide directs you through the works in a logical order. For the most part, individual works/objects are listed but not discussed, but notable works are identified with asterisks. Particularly remarkable works, such as Cathedrals and great fresco cycles, are discussed in more detail. If you are interested in Italian art, architecture, and ancient history, then this book tells you where to find it in Tuscany, and provides brief descriptions. The guidebook does not teach you the history of art and architecture in Tuscany, nor should it. For this, you will need to do some additional reading. Fine maps and a brief history are provided for each significant town. Parking advise is provided for most towns, and I strongly suggest you follow this advise. (I learned this the hard way.) Also pay close attention to the opening hours, which are quite accurate. The guide's hotel and restaurant recommendations seem quite good; they overlap significantly with the Michelin Red Guide and Frommers. Unfortunately, no descriptions or prices are provided, so most people will want another guidebook for this use. Some of the site closure information was out of date, but I expect this to be updated with the 2000 edition.

The Blue Guide series focuses on art. If you are looking for hotels, shopping, restaurants, or for entertaining reading, rely on something else. If you're looking for a serious guide to history, art, and architecture, both the well-known and the quietly tucked away, a list of hours and days open for musuems, holidays (often to be avoided!), as well as addresses of libraries and research insitutions, the Blue Guides are for you. They cover almost every artwork in the various regions, and do so accurately. The books guide the reader systematically through churches and museums and include accurate floor plans. Towns are grouped into touring areas, as are neighborhoods in the large cities. Town maps, even for little places, are plentiful and precise, even for the winding streets of Siena. City maps, such as Florence, are equally precise and inclusive, but they are split among several pages, which can make them harder to follow --- a minor flaw. I use Blue Guides as a textbook for my college students, and I never go to Italy without at least one!