Rating: 
Summary: Good guide, but you may need another one as well...
Review: I like Eyewitness travel guides, even if I usually complement them with other, more "wordy" ones. This one, as well as all the ones I own, is a good, relatively short (but heavy!) guide very helpful to give you good hints about what to see over an area as large as Italy. The nice pictures & diagrams are THE big plus of this guide.
On the minus side, you will find only a few words about most of the locations described in this guide, so if you are looking for something deeper, of if you like historical anecdotes about the places you visit, this guide is not ideal. Another minus is the relatively scant number of hotels and restaurants listed in the guide, surely a result of the large area covered. Also, the information you are given on restaurants is almost invariably composed of 20 words or so. So (let me digress, here) if good food is important on your trips (and it may well be when you travel in Italy...), this guide is not ideal. If you are looking for GREAT food, at GREAT prices, in GREAT locations, what you should do, once you are in Italy, is looking for the "Guida alle osterie d'Italia", published by Slow Food. Unfortunately, it's only available in Italian... But maps and addresses are the same in every language. Anyway, I tried several of the places listed in such guide, and I have always been at the very least very impressed, for huge and outstanding meals (usally wonderful traditional local cuisine) at around twenty euros or so per person, wine included. Really, if you like food and wine, it's worth it, even if you don't speak Italian...
Going back to Eyewitness, it is overall a good guide to use as a starting point to plan a trip, but if you really care about what you see, and what you eat, you should also look somewhere else.
P.S. If you are fond of Italian food, and you are travelling to Italy, you may also want to check out "Al Dente", a delightful travelogue by an English food lover & connoisseur who really understands what the relation between food and life is for most Italians (or at least for Italians like me...).
Rating: 
Summary: NOT FOR BACKPACKERS!
Review: Love, love, love the pictures of the places, the people and (yum) the foods of each region. However, the book isn't really comprehensive and reviews mostly "high end" places (whether it's restaurant or hotels) that I personally found not affordable. In other words, if you've got a pretty large budget, this is the book for you. But if you're a backpacker kinda traveller, stay away!
Rating: 
Summary: Great pictures and history but that's about it
Review: I found this book to be good as a PRE-trip resource. I just returned from 10 days in Tuscany. The book gives a decent history of the cities and the pictures are amazing. Otherwise it doesn't do much to help you plan a trip beyond saying "I'd like to go there."
Rating:
Summary: Above the rest!
Review: I can honestly say that no other brand of travel guide will give you the feel of a country more than DK's Eyewitness series. Eyewitness Italy is a beautiful book that uses excellent pictures, maps, and illustrations more than words to bring across the FEEL of Italy.
When planning a trip to Italy, I would recommend this book along with the Rough Guide to Italy as an unbeatable duo. Whereas Rough Guide provides you with the nitty-gritty and exhaustive traveling advice, Eyewitness Italy will ensure that you will be anticipating your trip like none other.
Perhaps the best part of this guide are the beautifully illustrated maps. In all my years, I have never known a MAP to get me excited about traveling. Yet gorgeously illustrated with tons of detail, the maps in this book did just that.
For those spending time in Rome, I might also recommend DK's Top 10 Rome, a fun book filled helpful and fun top 1 lists ranging from the Top 10 Roman Ruins to the Best Desert Choices to the Best Attractions for Kids. It will work very well as a supplement to this book.
The most aesthetically pleasing of all the Italian Travel Guides, Eyewitness Italy is a beautiful book to read, whether it's employed on the plane there or on the coffee table at home.
Rating: 
Summary: Pretty pictures, but...
Review: I think the title of my review wraps it all up: the eyewitness guides are a work of graphic art. Their highlight is probably the great work on the maps, both small and large scale, which are of great help as you navigate around the cities and country looking for sights. As a tool for reaching all of the sights you want to see, I would say that the Eyewitness Guide is among the best, with its regional maps, street maps, neighborhood maps and Metro/subway guides. In addition to this, as another positive comment I would say that it is a great guide to take on a trip if you don't have much time and you need information presented in an easy-to-read, simple manner. The drawings and photos, and the way they are laid out, is very appealing. In fact, this guidebook is almost better just for getting an idea of what Italy looks like than as an actual guidebook to be used in the city itself. You might want it more as a keepsake after your trip than as a tool on the trip. The advantages stop there, however. If you really want to get to know a city, you simply need more in-depth historical and cultural information on the sights you are seeing. Most of the locations described in the Eyewitness Guide do not stretch beyond a paragraph or two, which is quite superficial in my opinion. If you really want to know about the history behind the church, monument, museum, castle or park you have traveled so far to see, you will definitely need another guidebook to give you any kind of detail. When I went to Italy, I rented a car and thought that the pictures would help me choose whether to travel to one town or another, due to the photographically oriented focus of the book, but in the end, even the pictures are a bit superficial: for many towns, the only pictorial representation is part of a panel from the façade of a church, or a photograph of a fountain. Hardly enough to make a decision on whether to spend your next day in one Tuscan town or another. Harsh critique also for the hotel and restaurant information, which is limited to places designed for the rich and famous, or at least the very upper of the upper-middle class. The best guides give you a little info. on all styles of lodging and food, from low budget to luxury, but these guides make little effort to do so, and even the information on the laps of luxury is limited to little symbols, instead of providing descriptions like other guides do. With this combination of characteristics, I think Eyewitness is good to take along for a short trip in which you have little time to spend seeing places and you don't really care about getting any deep information on what you're seeing. Otherwise, keep looking for another guidebook, especially for a country like Italy, where background information and history are just as fascinating as the actual monuments and buildings.
|
