After looking at a lot of Italy travel planning books, Fodor’s Essential Italy: Rome, Florence, Venice & the Top Spots in Between is the one I went with. We carried this book everywhere. It doesn’t have a lot of details about any one location within a city, but it has plenty to whet your appetite. We used the book to plan some of our days and to make sure we didn’t miss anything big. The book breaks out each region of a city with the highlights in that region. This is very useful for efficiency if you are someone who doesn’t like to backtrack. It still takes quite a bit of planning to make the most of your time. I am someone that likes to plan routes so I had a mental picture of the order and direction we would take to hit the most important things on my list.

The book also has some restaurant recommendations that we used a few times. Every restaurant we tried was excellent. Note: we never had a bad meal in Italy so, the Fodor’s recommendations could have been random and I bet the food would have still been good. Note #2: truffles taste like dirt. I don’t like pasta with truffles.  To me, truffles taste like dirt.

On the sites to see Fodor’s highlights certain “attractions” and when we were near one we made sure we got to that highlighted site when we could. This is my favorite book for European travel planning (at least for Italy travel planning).