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Frommers Italy 2018
ISBN 978-1-62887-344-3 (paper), 978-1-62887-345-0 (e-book)
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Editor: Alexis Lipsitz
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5 4 3 2 1
Frommer's Star Ratings System
Every hotel, restaurant and attraction listed in this guide has been ranked for quality and value. Here's what the stars mean:
Recommended
Highly Recommended
A must! Don't miss!
AN IMPORTANT NOTE
The world is a dynamic place. Hotels change ownership, restaurants hike their prices, museums alter their opening hours, and busses and trains change their routings. And all of this can occur in the several months after our authors have visited, inspected, and written about, these hotels, restaurants, museums and transportation services. Though we have made valiant efforts to keep all our information fresh and up-to-date, some few changes can inevitably occur in the periods before a revised edition of this guidebook is published. So please bear with us if a tiny number of the details in this book have changed. Please also note that we have no responsibility or liability for any inaccuracy or errors or omissions, or for inconvenience, loss, damage, or expenses suffered by anyone as a result of assertions in this guide.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Stephen Brewer has been savoring Italian pleasures ever since he sipped his first cappuccino while a student in Rome many, many years ago (togas had just gone out of fashion). He has written about Italy for many magazines and guidebooks and remains transported in equal measure by Bolognese cooking, Tuscan hillsides, the Bay of Naples, and the streets of Palermo.
A long-time contributor to Frommers guides, Elizabeth Heath has served as editor-in-chief to several regional magazines, and writes articles on travel, business, celebrities, politics, and lifestyle for online, local, regional, and national outlets. Liz fell in love with Italy on her first visit 17 years ago. She now lives in the green hills of Umbria with her family, plus five dogs, several hundred olive trees, and acres of grapevines. She writes about the peculiarities of life in the Italian countryside in her award-winning blog, My Village in Umbria.
Stephen Keeling has been traveling to Italy since 1985 and covering his favorite nation for Frommers since 2007. He has written for The Independent, Daily Telegraph, various travel magazines, and numerous travel guides as well as the award-winning Frommers Guide to Tuscany & Umbria. Stephen resides in New York City.
Michelle Schoenung is an American journalist and translator in Milan who relocated to the Belpaese in 2000 for what was to be a yearlong adventure. Almost 2 decades later, she is pleased that Milan has evolved into a much more international and cosmopolitan city and has shed its image of merely being a foggy northern Italian business hub. Her writings and translations have appeared in magazines and books in the United States and Italy. In her free time, she likes to read, run, travel, and explore the city with her two rambunctious Italian-American bambini.
Donald Strachan is a travel journalist who has written about Italy for publications worldwide, including National Geographic Traveler, The Guardian, Sunday Telegraph, CNN.com, and many others. He has also written several Italy guidebooks for Frommers, including Frommers EasyGuide to Rome, Florence, and Venice. He lives in London, England. For more, see www.donaldstrachan.com.
Florences Duomo.
J ust speak the word Italy, and you can already see it. The noble stones of ancient Rome and the Greek temples of Sicily. The wine hills of Piedmont and Tuscany, the ruins of Pompeii, and the secret canals and crumbling palaces of Venice. For centuries, visitors have come here looking for their own slice of la dolce vita , and for the most part, they have found it.
Nowhere in the world is the impact of the Renaissance felt more than in its birthplace, Florence, whose vast repository of art includes works left by Masaccio, Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and many, many others. Much of the known world was once ruled from Rome, a city supposedly founded by twins Romulus and Remus in 753 b.c. Theres no place with more artistic treasuresnot even Venice, a seemingly impossible floating city whose beauty and history was shaped by its centuries of trade with the Byzantine and Islamic worlds to the east.
Of course, theres more. Long before Italy was a country, it was a loose collection of city-states. Centuries of alliance and rivalry left a legacy of art and architecture in Verona, with its Shakespearean romance and intact Roman Arena; and in Mantua, which blossomed during the Renaissance under the Gonzaga dynasty. Padua and its sublime Giotto frescoes are within easy reach of Venice, too. In Siena, ethereal art and Gothic palaces survive, barely altered since the citys 1300s heyday.
A millennium earlier, the eruption of Vesuvius in a.d. 79 preserved Pompeii and Herculaneum under volcanic ash. They remain the best places to get close-up with everyday life in the Roman era. The buildings of ancient Greece still stand at Paestum, in Campania, and at sites on Sicily, the Mediterraneans largest island. Cave dwellings, frescoed rupestrian churches, and even a rock cathedral honeycomb one side of Matera, in Basilicata.
Dining Italian style at alfresco cafe near the church of Santa Maria Assunta in Monteriggioni.
The corrugated, vine-clad hills of the Chianti and the cypress-studded, emerald-green expanses of the Val dOrcia serve up iconic images of Tuscany. Adventurous walkers of all ages can hike between the coastal villages of the Cinque Terre, where you can travel untroubled by the 21st century. Whether its seafood along the Sicilian coast, pizza in Naples, pasta in Bologna, pesto in Genoa, or the red Barolo and Barbaresco wines of Piedmont, your taste buds are in for an adventure of their own. Milan and Florence are centers of world fashion. Welcome to La Bella Italia.