Guidebooks to Florence (and Siena)
My mother and I are planning a trip to Italy in October. We’re planning to visit three cities: Rome, Florence, and Siena. In preparation, I’ve been reviewing guidebooks to Florence and Siena.
Knopff’s Mapguide is more of a map than a guidebook. It hasn’t been revised since 2005 so the hours are dubious but the six maps are well done and the major attractions are clearly marked. It feels like it’ll hold up well and the foldout construction is convenient. Having the city marked into separate sections (even if somewhat arbitrarily) is handy as well. It’s nice to be able to group attractions. I’d expect to be carrying this with us on days we’re in Florence. This book doesn’t cover Siena at all.
Rick Steve’s Florence & Tuscany 2007 covers both Florence and Siena (and other Tuscan towns) and we’re vehemently assured that it’s thoroughly up to date by Rick himself. About half the book is Florence. Siena gets the coverage it needs. It’s well organized, contains some excellent travel tips, and covers the highlights in great detail. He includes a separate “tour guide” for most of the major attractions that tells you what to see there and which order to see it in. I don’t know if we’ll follow his tours that explicitly but they look like they’d be good to read before the visit so we’ll know if there are particular works of art we should be looking for. My mother felt like we’d missed some in Paris.
The book also has suggestions for walking tours. Those will be very nice if they’re accurate. We tried to do a couple of walking tours from the Frommer’s Paris guide and ended up frustrated and lost. It seemed like it worked better if I mapped our route between attractions based mainly on getting there by major streets. This is definitely the book we’ll use most and I don’t feel the need for another one, although one thing it is lacking is any kind of handy pull-out map. Rick Steve suggests picking up a map at a TI there. We had a free map like that in Paris that was better than anything we’d bought at home, so we’ll certainly do that.
Frommer’s Italy 2007 tries to cover all of Italy and as such it fails to cover much of Florence or Siena. The book has more to say about Rome but even there it’s not at the level of their Paris guide which we found excellent. Lesson learned – find the most specific book on the area that you can, even if you’re visiting multiple areas.