Everyone going to Italy should have a guide book.
I do not mean a phrase book or dictionary. You should have one of those too. Some guide books have a section on phrases or common terms, but that really isn’t enough for anyone for staying in Italy for more than a week. But I’ll write about them later. For now, let’s stick to guide books.
What follows is a rundown of some of the more popular guide books that you are likely to find in the travel section of a Barnes & Noble. All of them are available on line at Amazon or some such. Click on the title below for the link, where you can also see reader reviews. You may also want to click on some of the other links I provide below. I should emphasize that these remarks are only my personal opinion. Others, including experienced faculty and directors in this program, will have their own views. Some people swear by guides that I do not care for, and who’s to say who’s right? So be prepared to make your own judgment.
Also, I am not going to comment on more specialized guides, such as guides to particular cities or regions, with one exception (see below). Almost all of the major guide book series have separate, smaller books on Rome or Venice or Tuscany or whatever. Since you will be traveling around a fair portion of Italy for the first time, I would advise against these. A single, general guide book will do. Nor will I discuss internet guides, such as those you can download to an iPhone. I don’t have much experience with these, and anyone who takes an iPhone to Italy may find that the cost of using it either as a phone or for internet access is prohibitively expensive (although things keep changing). I will however say a few words about one archaeological guide at the end.
Your Father’s Guide Books
Fodor’s Italy is updated annually, as are many (though not all) general guide books. At 960 pages this year, it is the quintessential upper-middle class guide book, with all kinds of useful information—useful, that is, to your parents if they were doing the traveling. It has a hundred pages on Rome (and two on Montepulciano).
Along with sites and museums (including times and ticket prices), directions, maps, travel tips, websites, and local tourist offices (very useful), you will find restaurants, hotels, and shopping, but usually priced beyond a typical student’s budget. It is very handy—I confess that I get one every time I go to Italy—but you will not find youth hostels or cheap eats. And it’s heavy.
Frommer’s Italy: You can just re-read everything about Fodor’s above. There is little to choose between them. I marginally prefer Fodor’s, but I’m not sure why.
A good way to use both Fodor’s and Frommer’s is to simply tear out the pages for any place you are planning to visit—say, Venice—and take just those when you go. There’s no need to be sentimental about a book like this, and there won’t be a test, so you don’t need to carry the whole thing with you on a weekend trip if your destination is clear and your plans are set.
Eyewitness Guide to Italy. Some people love the
Eyewitness Guide series because it gives pictures of just about everything you will see on a standard tourist itinerary. That is exactly why I don’t like it.
Why would I want pictures of things I’m planning to take photos of myself? Do I really need a picture to tell me that this is the colosseum? Still, some newcomers to Italy (including some past faculty in this program) have loved it. Not as thick or detailed as Fodor’s or Frommer’s (and therefore less heavy), it will nevertheless whet your appetite if seeing a picture ahead of time doesn’t spoil it for you.
Green Guide to Italy. The
Green Guide series is published by Michelin (although you should not confuse this with the French Guides Michelins).
It is really a driver’s guide, but it is surprisingly handy at times, since it is a) not heavy, and b) gives a minimalist but still good summary of major sites and museums. It is a good alternative to the Fodor-Frommer type of guide book.
Not Your Father’s Guide Books (unless he went to Europe as a student)
Let’s Go Italy. The
Let’s Go series has
an interesting history. It began in 1960 as a mimeographed, twenty page guide for Harvard students going to Europe. It has since blossomed into a
substantial publishing enterprise, with guides for many countries around the world, all researched and written by Harvard students.
It is intended to be the budget conscious student’s guide to Italy or wherever.
Let’s Go is the book that will tell you about youth hostels, real cheap eats, student hangouts, etc, as well as giving you most of the usual basic country information you need (hospitals, police, tourist offices, etc.). It has been useful to me in the past.
That said, I am not as big a fan of
Let’s Go as I once was, and not just because I am, um, a bit older. Some guide books err on the side of giving you too much information;
Let’s Go seems (to me) to give too little, and its recommendations have occasionally disappointed me in the past. However, it too is updated frequently, and the
Let’s Go office insists that every place their guides mention has been personally visited by one of their student researchers, despite the scepticism of some. The latest Italy guide is actually thinner than usual, but it may be that they are deliberately trying not to give you some thick-as-a-brick guide book, or just the student version of Frommer’s. Judge for yourself.
Lonely Planet Italy. The
Lonely Planet series was
founded by an Australian couple who set out to produce guides for the budget traveler.
They have been enormously successful—so much so that they ended up with an empire that has been bought by the BBC, ironically making them quite wealthy. They have a
large internet presence, and you can even buy
individual chapters of their guides as downloadable PDF files.
I have a soft spot for the
Lonely Planet. When I visited Turkey in the 1980s, Lonely Planet was just about the only general guide book available for that country. That is obviously not the case now, certainly not for Italy, but it does still seem to try to meet the needs of the more budget conscious, and not just students, though it is a bit more upscale than it used to be. So if you, like me, are a Comfort Inn kind of guy instead of Hilton Rewards, this could be for you.
Update: I almost forgot! One other more-or-less budget guide aimed (in part at least) at student travelers is the
Rough Guide series. Not quite as low budget as
Let's Go but also not suffering so much from the tendency to go upscale of
Lonely Planet,
Rough Guides tries to capture the crowd inbetween those scraping by in youth hostels and the upper-middle class package tourism of
Fodor's. I have used
Rough Guides in the past with profit. This year's edition of
Rough Guide Italy, however, clocks in at 1040 pages, so it is pretty hefty. See the reviews on Amazon.
And Rick Steves Is Not Your Father
Rick Steves’ Italy. If I could live my life over again, I might choose to be
Rick Steves. This guy has made a personal industry out of his travel experiences, and now he gets to go everywhere while others (that is, the people who buy his books) pay him to do it. He has radio broadcasts, TV shows (you can see a clip on Montepulciano
here), an
internet site, as well as guide books with his own name on them, even though by now he has a group of employees helping him crank out all this stuff. He even sounds a little nerdy, although that may be part of his appeal.
That said, I have known travelers who think his guides, including Italy, are terrific, or at least really, really handy, so much so that I may break down this year and finally get one myself.
He does offer out-of-the-way information you are not likely to find elsewhere, particularly as regards food, customs, or certain sites that get too little attention in Fodor’s/Frommer’s/Green Guides. Two former directors of this program hold his guide in high regard, and one of them swears he was rescued on the bay of Naples by a taxi driver’s phone number he found in Rick Steves. So look him over. His website offers free tourist apps for your iPhone, but I have never used these and have no idea how useful they are.
So What Should You Do?
Since you will not be alone—at a minimum you will be sharing an apartment with three other students—a good plan is to decide ahead of time amongst yourselves who will get what guide book. You can choose roommates when we all meet in Milledgeville, and if each of you gets a different book—a
Frommer’s, a
Rick Steves, a
Let’s Go, and a
Lonely Planet—then you are covered for just about every possible contingency.
All of these guide books have sections on the history and customs of Italy as well as important information on such things as medical issues, law,
et cetera, and you should make a point of reading these. In fact, if I could, I’d make you read them and then test you on it. Nothing so enhances an international experience as having some idea, however minimal, about the country you are visiting, and nothing is more irritating while traveling abroad than hearing clueless Americans complain or ask questions about things they would know if they just bothered to crack open a guide book for twenty minutes.
And Now For Those Other Guide Books (For the Fanatical Traveller and Sight Seer)
There is at least one other guide book series of which you should be aware, even if you don’t want to plunk down the dollars, and that is the
Blue Guide (not to be confused with the French
Guides Bleu, with which they were once connected long ago).
The
Blue Guides have a long and
interesting publishing history that is not important for our purposes. What is important is that, while there is a
Blue Guide Concise Italy for the whole country,
Blue Guides for Italy are mainly concerned with particular regions and cities. Thus there is the
Blue Guide to Rome (and a concise Rome version as well), the
Blue Guide to Southern Italy, the
Blue Guide to Northern Italy, the
Blue Guide to Tuscany, the
Blue Guide to Central Italy, the
Blue Guide to Venice, the
Blue Guide to the Marche and San Marino, the
Blue Guide to Sicily, and the
Blue Guide to Florence.
You will not usually find hotels or restaurants or other such in a
Blue Guide (although there are exceptions). They are updated periodically but not annually (the
Blue Guide to Rome is presently in its tenth edition).
You
may find travel directions, and these are often better than what you get in more standard guide books. You
may find museum hours, but these change all the time anyway. What you
will find is more information than you can easily handle about what you are actually looking at. If you want one book that tells you all (or often more than) you need to know about a particular site or museum or city, the
Blue Guide is it.
Blue Guides are the guide books you don’t tear out the pages from.
Some people find the
Blue Guides unwieldy or offering more than they want—a lot more, in fact. Personally I love them and rely on them heavily. I still have the
Blue Guide to Rome by the redoubtable Alta Macadam that I bought and thumbed through carefully when I first visited Rome in 1993, although I have purchased several revised editions since then, including the most recent. It is in my estimation the best one volume guide to every museum and site in the city and the general area around Rome, and its detailed street maps have guided (or rescued) me on many, many occasions.
Apart from not having the kind of information they do not claim or pretend to provide, such as hotels and restaurants,
Blue Guides have two drawbacks: they are heavy and they are expensive. They have grown bigger (or fatter) over the years, and now include many pictures and illustrations that, while nice, add significantly to the cost. If you are inclined to get more than one, then consider buying them in Italy (there are several places you can find them) or ordering them from Amazon and having them shipped directly to Montepulciano.
Finally, I would be remiss if I did not mention a at least one guide book for the student who is particularly interested in the actual classical city of Rome. That is the
Oxford Archaeological Guide to Rome by Amanda Claridge, recently reissued in a second edition. The
Blue Guide to Rome is likely to tell the novice all he or she will need to know even about just the ancient city, but Claridge’s book does go into somewhat more detail, with more site plans, for those so inclined and who find themselves, like me, forever captivated by the Eternal City.
