Rating: 
Summary: Great Travel Guide, Beautiful Coffee Table Book!
Review: .
Summary:
Every Dorling Kindersley Guide has been a great and interesting book... and delightful to have and use, even if you are not traveling to that location, but are only interested in learning more!The Guides are well organized in a logical and easy to follow manner. They are beautifully illustrated, well developed with accurate information (it is unusual for hotel and restaurant information to be that accurate), have enough history to help the reader understand the people and cultural background, and have a lot of useful travel information and useable maps in the appendixes. The really great attraction to this book is several fold; it is:
............Very complete
............Easy to read
............Beautifully and artistically completed
............Good shopping, safety and other tips
............Gorgeous photographs too numerous to list. Specifics:
The guides are organized as follows: How to use this guide
Introduction to Historical and Geographical information
Geographical Regions
............Introduction Venice
........................Intro to Venice
........................Portrait of Venice
........................Through the Year (events, holidays)
........................History
............Venice Area by Area, each section includes:
........................Introduction to street by street area
........................Detailed pictorials of area buildings
........................Architectural drawings, pictures, cut-aways of buildings
........................Specific stops, historical monuments, churches, buildings, etc.
............Veneto Area by Area (same format as above) Travelers Needs - includes full list with rankings and notes
............Hotels
............Restaurants, bars, cafes
............Shops / Markets
............Entertainment Survival Information
............Practical
........................Tourist info., Etiquete, Personal Security and Health ........................Currencies, Telephones, misc info.
............Travel Information
........................Planes, trains and automobiles, signs
............Street Maps ............General Index
............Phrase Book Discussion:
The book begins with "Introducing Venice", including a complete map, a review, the city's history, and Venice thought the Year - including events, etc. Areas with an "At a glance" overview, then has subsections of specific blocks, or forums, then specific locations, churches, historical monuments, bridges, galleries, etc. Architectural reviews include various views, and cutaways; given greater understanding and better perspective. They are all attractive, if not works of art - honestly. The travelers' Info. offers good and valid info. on prices, currencies, customs, important words, etc. I used the reviews on hotel's restaurants and nightclubs, etc. and found they were useful and accurate, and helpful with my touring and site decisions The books are so well thought-out that it has multiple maps, with various lookup tables, and the book's flaps are designed to be used as bookmarks for map pages. Conclusion:
Each book in this series is a great help, and beautiful collectible resource. As the President, CEO of an International Meeting Planning Corporation we have many resources and techniques to learn about places we have meetings / groups at as well as the cities and sights. But, as a traveler, this book really is top notch and I would recommend it to anyone going on a personal trip, or wanting to learn about a city, or location. We have used some of these books to augment our research to investigate cities for our groups.
Rating:
Summary: Best illustrations, maps!
Review: After reading this awesome book, I can't wait to see it in person. It will be like a return trip. Maps, illustrations, directions are wonderful; we used the one on France during previous trip. Found many out of the way places.
Rating: 
Summary: It's Easy to Get Lost in Venice...
Review: and with this unhelpful guide, it's especially easy-in fact it almost broke up my marriage! The maps are simply not detailed enough for reliable navigation and the fact that you must see adjoining maps for continuation make it especially frustrating -in a city where the average street seems to be only 1 block long-streets rarely continue from one map to the other. Using the maps became an exercise in exhaustion. Just a bit of overlap between map pages would have greatly facilitated navigation. The book is also not up to date. For instance the Vaporetto routes that run from the large car park at Tronchetto are not different than the ones that actually serviced that stop, leading me to have to alter plans as to how I would get to my hotel. I also found the restaurant recommendations unreliable and wound up doing far better trusting my own instincts. In fairness, I did use one of the recommended hotels and was quite pleased with the accommodations, and the index is quite thorough and easy to use. In sum, if, for some unexplained reason, you feel compelled to purchase this guidebook, buy it because of the pictures and by all means, make sure you have a good map to supplement it.
Rating:
Summary: Beautiful Venice from Dorling Kindersley
Review: DK Eyewitness Travel Guides books are synonymous with Quality. I have seen other DK books and they really do make a quality product. The high-quality paper they print on makes the photographs and text appear brilliant. This tour book on Venice contains just about everything you can think of and then some. Places to visit (by land or canal), places to dine, maps, hotels, history, currency, transportation and much more are all attractively detailed. This is a great book if you are thinking about or are planning a trip to Venice. Even if you are not taking a trip this is a good book about the city and culture. I highly recommend Dorling Kindersley (DK) books.
Rating:
Summary: one of two essential books on Venice
Review: DK has done an outstanding job with this book. The photographs and illustrations are first rate - angles, cropping, detail enhancement, color/lighting - all are superbly produced and intelligently presented. In addition, there is plenty of helpful information (locations, hours, tips ). History/background is brief, but as expected in a general survey guide. The heavier, art quality pages add a bit to the weight (approx 1.4 lbs), but it is definitely worth it, given the volume's beauty and durability. For any trip to Venice and the surrounding area, this is one of two essential books (Venice for Pleasure, is the other).
Rating:
Summary: Make Eyewitness essential part of your travel fun
Review: DK's Eyewitness Travel Guides are our best travel companion during our tour of Europe. Full of tips, pictures, maps, site info, history, local reference ... every page is not only helpful but beautiful. The layout anf format is very innovative and reader friendly, a ture standing out from any other travel books. It was interesting to see that almost everywhere we went, we saw other people (tourists apparently) holding and checking the same DK book on the street.
The coverage is comprehensive and growing year after year, Paris, Rome, Florence, Venice ... every city we went have its own Eyewitness serie. We studied them before our trip, consulted them during our trip, and kept them as memo and photo book after our trip. They are simply essential part of the travel fun. I recommend buying indiviual city/area book wherever possible instead of the country book. For example, buy Rome, Florence, and Venice books instead of Eyewitness Italy (unless your destination doesn't have its own Eyewitness). That way you get more detailed and targeted info.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent job - you'll need very little to supplement this
Review: Eyewitness did its usual brilliant job with Venice & Veneto. I bought many guides available to this city but took only two with me: DK Eyewitness and City Secrets (the latter one is an excellent assortment of subjective specialist views, get it if you take your trip seriously). Descriptions of usual high-profile highlights and lesser-known places are clear and accurate, as usual, pictorial plans of churches and streets are very helpful. Accommodation and dining sections are quite superficial, I increasingly find these parts not the strongest bit of Eyewitness guides: they tend to focus on most famous places which rarely represent the best value for money and often are shameless tourist traps. In fact, there is no need to list specific places - what the guide could do is present general guidelines on what to avoid (such as places with menus in five languages) and what to look for (places that don't take credit cards, for example). I found the map of Venice at the end of the book completely sufficient and as easy to use as could be possible in the Venetian maze of streets of multiple names and multiple spellings. Veneto part is not really the best bit of the book - Verona is covered only adequately and Padova receives simple an inadequate treatment. The authors probably had to find a balance between thickness of the book and depth of coverage. I was pleased with coverage of less obvious areas such as Dorsoduro and Canareggio, which are still inexplicably ignored by 90% of visitors (well, maybe they don't have time). All the criticisms above are observations of only minor glitches of what is a very, very strong guide and what probably should be your first choice for a trip to Venice.
Rating:
Summary: Eyewitness Guides Can't Be Beat!
Review: Eyewitness Travel Guides are encyclopedias for the city and surrounding area. Anything AND everything you must know about is covered with gorgeous pictures and historical background on churches, towns, people and food in Venice & the Veneto. I NEVER travel without a DK Eyewitness Guide. Please note that the hotel and restaurant information in the back has been little useful because nowadays, the internet,
word-of-mouth and frankly, travel guru Rick Steves' are more reliable in the hotel area. And as far as the restaurants are concerned, that's not something you can plan ahead of time. Recommendations upon arrival in Italy are best. The natives know where to enjoy the local eats. Don't leave home without Eyewitness. Ciao!
Rating:
Summary: Eyewitness Guides Can't Be Beat!
Review: Eyewitness Travel Guides are encyclopedias for the city and surrounding area. Anything AND everything you must know about is covered with gorgeous pictures and historical background on churches, towns, people and food in Venice & the Veneto. I NEVER travel without a DK Eyewitness Guide. Please note that the hotel and restaurant information in the back has been little useful because nowadays, the internet,
word-of-mouth and frankly, travel guru Rick Steves' are more reliable in the hotel area. And as far as the restaurants are concerned, that's not something you can plan ahead of time. Recommendations upon arrival in Italy are best. The natives know where to enjoy the local eats. Don't leave home without Eyewitness. Ciao!
Rating: 
Summary: The Best of the Lot
Review: Guidebooks in general are going to have their limitations. The gentleman that complained about this one answered his own complaint. A larger, folding map is certainly an essential when trying to navigate (and I use the term literally here) this city. That said, this appeared to me on a recent visit to be extremely helpful, especially in terms of giving me an artistic/cultural overview of the main sites. The same could be said about the same company's editions of Rome and Italy proper. They don't dwell on frivolous detail. They are relatively compact and they will guide you to the places you want to go if you are interested primarily in art, history, and architecture, which I was. As an aside, for anyone who is serious about art I would suggest that before you go you aquaint or refresh yourself with Vasari's <Lives of the Artists> (Penguin suggested), Cellini's "Autobiography," and any Art book published by Rizzoli. Buy your guidebooks beforehand and determine which artists and which works are most important to you and try to pre-plan in your minds eye at least the path you want to take. Also ask some travel agents or discover on a website the museum hours and when the publice is allowed in free. My only chance to visit the Vatican, for instance, came on a Sunday, when there was free admission and early closure, which led to a rush-job through the sistine chappel. Don't rely entirely on a site such as Rick Steves. My friend did and thought he could pretty much wing it through Italy. The "play it by ear approach" will lead to unbelievably costly delays and dissapointments. Plan, plan, plan.
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