Frommer's Italy 2008 Book

I confess: I don't know where I would start if I were assigned the monstrous/fabulous chore/pleasure of composing a tour-book about Italy. And to be fair, I generally like the authors' recommendations, though I did feel they angled toward a slightly older, slightly wealthier type of tourist than I consider myself. And I appreciated the extensive historical sketches at the start of each section. My friends, who were traveling with Fodor's 2010 guide, had little of that.

My beef with the book is its timeliness (severely outdated prices are listed for attractions as major as the Roman Forum and the Uffizi Gallery in Florence) and, even more than this, its maps. This book has much to offer, but its maps are abominable. The foldout map in the back of the book (which you must purchase the book before you can look at, those sneaky publishers...) offers deceptively "complete" maps of major cities Venice and Rome -- without major street names included. Inside the book, prime tourist cities (Venice, Florence, Rome, etc.) have at least three maps each -- one for restaurants, one for hotels, one for attractions -- but they're not cross-referenced, their keys are sometimes incomplete, and many of the sites described in the book appear nowhere on the map. So good luck finding them.