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Title: Pauline Frommer's Italy: Spend Less, See More (Pauline Frommer Guides)
ISBN: 0470247606
Author:
Keith Bain
Reid Bramblett
Pippa de Bruyn
Sylvie Hogg
Publicate Date: 2008-08-04
Publish: 2008-08-04
List Price: $21.99
Average Customer Rating: 4.0
Format: Paperback
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Amazon Lowest New Price: $12.33
Amazon Lowest Used Price: $11.69
Amazon Merchant Price: $14.95
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| Customer Review: |
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1: Pauline Frommer's Italy:Sped Less, See More
Nicely laid out, but so out of date! We went to three places she suggested and they no longer existed. She failed to mention which music clubs, etc. would be closed in August. We just stopped going to her suggested places. Her review of our Venice hotel was right on, and her suggestions for advanced tickets were helpful. Her desriptions of rooms in museums were also very helpful.
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2: Italy travel book
This is an excellent book. The condition was a little worse than described but acceptable.
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3: Fantastic Book; Good format and writing is not as dry as other travel books
My wife and I just got back from a week in Italy relying this book. The book's formatting made it easy to use. We selected all of our hotels using this book, trip adviser, and the New York Times. In retrospect, we would have been fine if we'd relied only on this book. The writing is also entertaining. My wife found especially helpful that this book contains writers' opinions about various sites and attractions, which is really what you need in a good travel book-- What the writers think you should see and not see. Obviously, their opinions are their own, but we found the opinions in this book to be very accurate and allowed us to save a lot of time. Finally, there were several specific instances in which this book saved us much more money than its retail price.
We highly recommend this book!
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4: Unreliable
Never trust the words 'north', 'south', 'east', or 'west' in this guide. In the chapter on Florence, they are wrong more than half the time. Never trust the words 'biggest', 'oldest', or 'highest.' They're wrong almost a third of the time in that chapter. Never trust literary or art descriptions. In the same chapter they're wrong many times. I only read the Florence chapter, and in it I skipped the hotels, food, shopping, and nightlife sections. So all of these errors appeared in only about twenty pages.
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5: Pauline's Italy - a worthy guidebook buy
I've always liked Frommer guidebooks; they are written for curious, adventurous travelers who are also on a budget.
Here are some highlights from Pauline's Italy guidebook:
* The best companies for in-depth tours of Rome, thereby avoiding bus tours that can be "slow, overpriced, deadly excursions in mass tourism."
* Spend a day training to be a gladiator with the men and women of Gruppo Storico Romano, sort of the Latin equivalent of the Society for Creative Anachronism.
* Two standout gelato places in Florence.
* Good info sidebars on tackling the Uffizi, visiting the birthplace of the Vespa scooter, Bologna's thriving gay scene and whether a gondola ride is a ripoff or not.
* How to find self-catering apartments (and a good coffee place!) in Venice.
* A thorough review in sidebars of the various Italian museum pass options.
* One- to seven-day itineraries for the major Italian cities.
* Which chocolate shop in Venice has tobacco-flavored chocolates named for Sigmund Freud. (!!)
* Skiing in the Dolomites.
* How to book (way) ahead to see The Last Supper in Milan.
* Why Lecce is a good place to visit in Puglia, why you need to see the Greco-Roman theater in Taormina, Sicily and how to find the Mafia Museum in Corleone, near Palermo.
* Sections in the back on the major festivals, agritourismo and Italian cuisine and history.
I highly recommend this book.
My comments above are excerpted from a review I wrote on my BootsnAll Family Travel Logue - http://www.familytravellogue.com Thanks!
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