Top 10 Rome [With Pull-Out Map]

Excellent book , expecially for us travelers with too little time to do a thorough search of information on this famous city. The text is organized so that you can easily pick and choose topics of interest such as the 10 best museums. Photos and illustrations add to the ease in understanding the text as do the directions and phone numbers included for many sites and locations. Our experience reading the book combined with a few internet searches made us feel like experienced tourists even before we left for our trip. Our only tip after visiting is to come prepared and bring along your book since you cannot expect much help and/or directions after you arrive as everyone else seems to be in a hurry or just uninterested in your dilema.

My wife and I love the Top 10 series. We always buy a Frommers or Rick Steves book for the trip's planning, but the Top 10 is a must for the trip itself. It'll fit in a pocket (a long one), and will provide quick and easy references to the most important sights, as well as maps and public transportation routes.

My edition of the Mini Rough Guide to Rome is a book, so I don't have any of the previous reviewer's gripes about buying a computer program. I used this guide when I visited Rome for a week or so in 2001 and again last year in 2005 when I lived in Rome for over a month. It's full of accurate, interesting information that covers every aspect of the city. As always with the Rough Guides, cultural and historical contexts are explained, good maps and building plans are given, and it's a pleasure to read. The guide is well organised, which is necessary since there is no way you'll see everything there is to see, or even everything you'd like to see, in just one visit to Rome (even if it lasts a month). All in all, a great guide.

This was my first Top 10 book, and I will buy them from now on. Seeing a city like Rome is overwhelming because there's so much to do there. Top 10 Rome helps you prioritize. It includes helpful maps and insightful excerpts about the society and history of the place. You should get it.

I recently spent two days in Rome with this book as my only guide and it was perfect. However, you could fill up a much longer trip just with the itineraries and suggestions from this book. I didn't even have time to hit all of the top 10 and there are probably over 50 different important sites recommended, described, and mapped out in this book.My favorite feature in the book is that in addition to the more general listings of restuarants, there are restaurants grouped by location right with the descriptions of the different sites. So, for example, if you're standing outside the Pantheon, as I did, thinking, hmm, it sure would be nice to get something to eat right about now... There's a list of restuarants in a number of price ranges that are located around the Pantheon, for example. Makes it easy either to plan out days either ahead of time or to make spontaneous decisions.Personally, I wish I had done a bit more reading and research before I went. The information in this book is not very in depth, as you might expect from a top 10 book. However, there's no need to tote along a history book in your suitcase, and this little book does give surprisingly good overviews and juicy tidbits.A tiny hint aside from the book, I found that many of the sites in Rome did not take as long to see as I thought. The Collosseum, the Pantheon, the Spanish Steps, were all surprisingly quick visits, it doesn't take long to appreciate and there isn't a great deal of detail to go into. Of course, this all depends on your tastes. I would have spent longer at the Vatican than I did, taken a couple tours. Also, be advised that the Sistine Chapel keeps weird hours from what I understand, so plan around it. And as for the Forum, or Il Foro Romano, nothing is labeled, and there are no official tours as far as I know, so learn about it beforehand if you want to fully appreciate it. That is my completely off-the-cuff, amateur and unsubstantiated advice. : )