Rick Steves' Italy 2008 (Rick Steves)

We are still in the planning process of our trip, but so far Rick Steve's book has been great. It is easy to read and organized in a user friendly manner. The size is small enough I can carry it around on our trip and use it as a quick reference. I used his 2006 England book with great success and believe the Italy book is going to be just as useful!

I also bought Frommer's 2008 Italy and am not as pleased with it. In comparison Rick Steve's reads easier. Frommer's reads like a dense textbook. There is almost too much information. Also, Rick Steve's offers complete museum tours so you don't have to buy the audioguides. All the information is in his book and tells you the best path to take. He also does walking tours so you can enjoy a free activity that really highlights a town. Frommer's just lists all the sights and leaves you to sort it out. Frommer's is definitely more inclusive than Rick Steve's; it has more towns, more hotels, more dining, and more sights, but I think it would be way to overwhelming to carry with me.

My plan is to carry Rick Steve's with me on my sightseeing, but to make some additional notes in it on stuff I found in Frommer's. All in all though, I think Rick Steve's is the better book, and if you only want to buy one, I'd buy Rick Steve's.

Rick Steves' Italy 2008 (Rick Steves)

This book is the perfect way to research your vacation.

Once again, I was not disappointed by a Rick Steves book. He gives you everything you need to know to plan a great trip. Lots of details and personal recommendations. We have used his books in the past and have followed his suggestions for where to sleep and eat. He is rarely wrong. I highly recommend this book for any one who is traveling to Europe.

I just got back from Italy and used Rick Steves' Italy 2008 along with Fodor's Essential Italy (which did not cover Naples). I usually use Lonely Planet, but that wasn't available for Italy in a 2008 edition.

While I liked some things about the book, I did not like the fact that the table of contents for a city just lists that city. For example, under Rome in the table of contents is no breakdown. So Rome is listed as being on page 595, and the next entry is Naples which starts on 712. This is not user friendly at all. Who wants to sequentially flip through 117 pages looking for something on Rome, like where to eat, or how to get around? Not I! And the index is not a sufficient solution. Lonely Planet and Fodor's lays out what is in their chapters infinitely better in their respective tables of contents.

Steves' maps in the book were unimpressive when I needed them and were relatively useless to me when I was in Italy. However, I now see that the book had some color maps in the beginning of the book before the table of contents, and none of them are listed in the table of contents, where I jumped to get my info. Now that I see it, it looks like the maps of Florence and Venice are good for what they show, and the map for Rome is too general, not showing any street names in some areas where travel is likely. Only those three city maps appear in the front of the book. There are other maps of varying usefulness throughout the book.

I went to Pisa and only brought Steves' book with me. I gave it to my 16 year old nephew to find us a place to eat. He read the book's recommendations and looked at the book's map showing the location of one of the recommended restaurants, and headed us here and there until I finally took over and discovered that the map was just terrible and didn't include enough information to make it easy. A road that continued indefinitely was drawn as terminating within eyesight of the train station. And an insufficient number of streets were labeled to be of assistance in getting oriented. We walked around for a while and finally ran into the restaurant (which was not open, but that may be because it was the day before Christmas, so that is not an issue here).

One nice thing about the chapter on Naples is that the book tells where to find the information center in the train station, not that it is particularly difficult, but it is very useful. There you can get information and a map--which is definitely needed if you are using Steves' book. Before we got the map, we just used Steves' book to find a pizza place "filled with locals" (i.e., Italians that don't speak English) that the book recommended. There was no related map in the book, just a description that included "a few blocks from the train station" and, depending on what one considers a few blocks, that may have been an accurate description. But we walked what seemed to be more than a few blocks and didn't run into a street that we were supposed to run into. So we started wandering for a while and discovered that it was further than we expected. It was then that we discovered that the book didn't give us a clue as to what to do once we got to this restaurant where no one appeared to speak English and there was a crowd of people outside waiting for something. Then it turned out that if you went in you could get a number--which would have been fine, except I have no idea what 138 sounds like in Italian, and there was no sign giving the numbers. I ran into someone who was using Lonely Planet's Naples 2008, and apparently LP didn't have any info either on what you do once you get to that restaurant, though it also listed that restaurant. Finally we were able to discover that the numbers given out were for those who wanted to sit in the restaurant--and that for carry out you just went in and ordered what you wanted. I sent in my nephews who somehow found someone (a customer) in the restaurant who spoke English and Italian and were finally able to put it together for a carry out pizza.

Another thing I consulted Steves' book for was how to get to the airport from Naples central train station, which is where I originally arrived in Naples. Unfortunately Steves' book doesn't touch on that. Or at least I didn't think so until I just ran into the information just now. In the "Orientation" section of the Naples chapter (of course not listed in the table of contents), there is a section entitled "Arrival in Naples" and discusses arriving by train and by boat, not by jet. But if I had only read everything in the Naples chapter I would have seen that at the end of the chapter was a section entitled "Transportation Connections" which would have given me some information but lacks the clarity to have solved my problem. Even so, it would have been nice if that section name were listed under Naples in the table of contents.

The plus side of this book is the general information. The "Helpful Hints" section, with regard to theft, pickpockets, etc., has very useful information in it. But the book fell apart for me when I needed specific and clear information to accomplish getting somewhere or doing something.

The book is a nice read, but too frustrating to rely on, with too many limited-value maps, and a major hassle to find stuff in.

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.