Rick Steves' Italy 2007 (Rick Steves)

I mostly rely on various websites when I travel but I found Spain to be just too large to handle on my own; so last year, I decided to get Steves' Spain book. Now that I'm getting ready to explore Italy, I've once more turned to Steves' guide book. He offers the most valuable practical information at the fingertips of the ordinary traveler. I know now what to expect and I can't ask for more.

We have used Rick Steves' travel guides in France, Spain and Central Europe and have found them to be very, very helpful. While it is true that Rick Steves' Italy 2010 doesn't cover the extreme southern part of Italy or Sicily, it covers the areas that we plan to visit, and in that respect, I feel it is fairly comprehensive. Of course, I would always recommend that one traveling to Italy consult other travel guides such as the Rough Guide to Italy, Frommers' Italy, and Lonely Planet's Italy. We have been successful in getting our local public library to order up-to-date travel guides on Italy, which are useful in planning our trip, but we purchased Rick Steves' Italy 2010 as the one guide to pack for the trip. I feel that it is an excellent investment. William D. Mashburn (Age 75)

Not quite a tourists' yellow pages nor quite a piece of literature on Italian history, Rick Steves' Italy 2008 had everything (almost) we wanted and nothing we didn't in order to plan and execute our first Italy trip. My wife and I used this book for preparing our trip and found ourselves carrying it everywhere we went during the trip. From form factor to content organization, the book reflects a certain level of maturity in writing and editing a travel book. The names of hotel and restaurant owners provided the much needed personal touch and ice breaker; little side notes minimize surprises due to benign mistakes that have a way of ruining good vacations; current information on trains, tours, hours, fees, phone numbers and maps take away the need to collect flyers as soon as you get to a new place. The book seems to have the right mix of information and opinion. Don't use the book as a guided-tour replacement at museums. Information about Tuscany is minimal and sub-par compared to rest of Italy. Focused tourists (say second time Italy visitors) may not get everything they are looking for. For hotel reservations, we cross-checked the book's suggestions with consumer reviews on TripAdvisor.com and found that to be very useful. Other than that, you should be pretty well covered.

We traveled to Italy with this book as well as several others. We found that this book was the one we kept coming back to for insightful and accurate information on sights and highlights. We were amazed to see so many other people carrying this book with them.

Rick Steves' Italy proved an excellent reference for us in our recent two-week tour of Italy. It was definitely the book we used the most. Instead of including volumes of information, Steves includes just what he deems the best--and we were very happy with his judgments. He divides Italy into nine areas to visit--the Dolomites, Lake Como, Venice, Milan, Florence, Cinque Terre, hill towns in Tuscany and Umbria, Rome, and Naples and the Amalfi Coast. Then he recommends several of the very best places within those areas. Two consequences of this concise method are a light, easy-to-use book and meeting other Americans holding Rick Steves' book in their hands. We enjoyed comparing notes.We enjoyed and traveled according to Steves' philosophy of looking for the uniqueness and character of every place and being as involved as possible with the local people. Steves' hotel and restaurant recommendations were good and accurate, based on cost, cleanliness, location, and c! haracter. Especially helpful were his brief and clear directions to stations, museums, hotels--any places of interest. Using this book, we felt we saw and did much of the best there was to see and do, without wasting time or spending too much money. Steves updates his books every year, so all the names and information were very current, though some prices had already changed.I would definitely use Rick Steves again for any future European travel. And though I don't really watch TV, I'm going to try to find his show on PBS. People swear by it.