Frommer's Tuscany & Umbria's Best-Loved Driving Tours

This was a great companion book with the Steves book on Tuscany. Each had its strengths. I liked that it included Umbria, since I was also visiting towns in that part of Italy.

Great book with good ideas. I wished it had been a little more detailed, especially as it relates to places to stay and eat along the way. More detailed road directions, with numbers, would also be helpful. A distance chart from city to city would give us a better idea of time to allow. But, it did give us ideas of places to visit that we hadn't originally thought about when we first started planning our trip. We look forward to driving several of the various trips the book describes. You definitely need to have an Italy road map to follow the trips.

I didn't give this book enough respect when I first got it. I was more into the "deep" guidebooks I'd ordered, with depth of history and cultural context, food recommendations, architecture tips, etc. But when I got to Italy for a week-long stay in Tuscany with a rental car, this slim volume of car tours took pride of place by my bedside at night and on my dashboard by day. When I was on the ground on vacation, and plans changed day by day, it was great to have a simple reference that just showed where to go. The itineraries are clear, well-illustrated, and with good capsule descriptions both of road directions and of the way points along the route. I didn't complete any of the "tours" shown in the book, but used portions of the tours in each area of Tuscany that we went to (from Sienna to hill towns to Pisa/Lucca) to guide us to points of interest near every major destination that we aimed for. That's the point of renting a car, isn't it? This book gave us -- simply and clearly -- the valuable ability to wander into wonderful smaller sights every day. Highly recommended.