Rating: 
Summary: Well-written, money-saving guide to Italy
Review: I found this great for the more out of the way places in Italy, especially walking in the national parks. Their coverage of history is good too - detailed but not boring. Good for nightlife and cheap accommodation.
Rating: 
Summary: Ugh! How depressing!
Review: I ordered this one by the Rough Guide brand name, after enjoying their Canada guide on my honeymoon. (My fault, should have read the customer reviews first!)However, after reading this book, I don't want to go to Italy at all! I appreciate a clear-eyed view, but their consistently cynical attitude is too much. According to them, Italy is a boring country full of churches, lame museums and herds of tragically average tourists. Their "too cool for school" attitude is really depressing. Stay away from this one. I'm on the site looking for an upbeat and helpful book right now!
Rating: 
Summary: "It's a "rough" guide, no doubt about that...
Review: I picked up this Rough Guide to Italy for a brief trip to Umbria and Lazio because my local shop sold out of the Let's Go equivalent. It annoyed me intensely. Firstly, it is unreasonably negative in tone throughout - someone who hadn't been there could be forgiven for thinking Italy is a crummy place with only a few mouldy monuments and the odd fresco to recommend it, which as a general impression is criminally wrong, and it's astounding that a guidebook should set out to give it. P>Secondly, Some of the maps aren't accurate and don't appear to have been checked or proof read. Throwaway lines such as "[the tourist office has] lots of reasonable but characterless rooms on their books and appartments to rent" on the basis of my anecdotal evidence simply aren't fair - Thirdly it's dreadfully turgid. Cheeky charm in a guide of this sort is obligatory these days, but the writing style is frequently leaden. Witness the following insight, which is typically put: "Of all Italy's historic cities, it's perhaps Rome which exerts the most compelling fascination." Good grief. Plus points - the "contexts" section, which overviews art, architecture, history, and the political and social set-up in italy (you know, the mafia, camorra and all that good stuff!), is a good read. There are plenty of maps of little places, too, but they're not collosally accurate. There are a few fairly uninteresting colour pics, but for my money they could have been left out and a buck shaved off the cover price. There must be better guides to Italy than this.
Rating:
Summary: Not up to the Rough Guide's usual standards
Review: I've used the Rough Guides literally around the world. I've been to Italy before, and I'm planning my trip for next May. This book is already a disappointment. In other books in the series, the assumption is that you've got a sense of exploration. You're just as willing to eat with a pack of camels in the middle of the Sahara as you are interested in staying at some wonderful over-the-top place like the Victoria Falls Hotel, because they're both experiences in their own rights. In addition, the guides typically contain excellent tactical explanations. This book doesn't do that. It seems targeted at the Lonely Planet crowd. Amazingly, there are only two pages of hotels and hostels listed for Florence, and only about three for Venice! There are no options for if you want to spend a lot of money staying in someplace fabulous for a few days to blow your budget. The listings for restaurants are even more sparse. What's good about it? It does seem to cover every monument in Italy, which is saying a lot. If you're a student of antiquities, it will do a good job of helping you find things. But for the first time in about 15 years, I'm actually going to rely on the Michelin Red Guide (and the Web) to find a bed and a meal.
Rating: 
Summary: Good, but not Ideal
Review: In my view, this guide has both good and bad points. Let's start with the good points first. The guide is comprehensive, and it provides a lot of information about lesser-known cities and sights. This was important for me --- so many guide books focus only on Rome, Florence, Venice and other major tourist draws, and we spent almost all of our time off the beaten track. Even better, the guide has city-center maps for many small towns. This is a great feature, since it often is hard to find the tourist office right way (where you can usually get a more inclusive map). All in all, the information about opening hours and what to expect from sights is correct and helpful. Now on to the negative aspects. Since it is so comprehensive, this guide is VERY heavy and carrying it around as you tour is a drag. If you're only planning to visit one region of Italy, you may do better to buy a lightweight guide to just that area. Secondly, the guide offers almost no tips for drivers (e.g. the best way in and out of town, parking info, etc.). If you plan to travel by bus or train, you'll get some help, but travelers by car will be left out in the cold. Finally, the authors often set themsleves up as "oh-so-knowing" arbiters of taste. The ironic, rather arrogant tone can be off-putting at times, although not all sections of the guide are as bad in this respect as others.
Rating:
Summary: Good, but not Ideal
Review: In my view, this guide has both good and bad points. Let's start with the good points first. The guide is comprehensive, and it provides a lot of information about lesser-known cities and sights. This was important for me --- so many guide books focus only on Rome, Florence, Venice and other major tourist draws, and we spent almost all of our time off the beaten track. Even better, the guide has city-center maps for many small towns. This is a great feature, since it often is hard to find the tourist office right way (where you can usually get a more inclusive map). All in all, the information about opening hours and what to expect from sights is correct and helpful. Now on to the negative aspects. Since it is so comprehensive, this guide is VERY heavy and carrying it around as you tour is a drag. If you're only planning to visit one region of Italy, you may do better to buy a lightweight guide to just that area. Secondly, the guide offers almost no tips for drivers (e.g. the best way in and out of town, parking info, etc.). If you plan to travel by bus or train, you'll get some help, but travelers by car will be left out in the cold. Finally, the authors often set themsleves up as "oh-so-knowing" arbiters of taste. The ironic, rather arrogant tone can be off-putting at times, although not all sections of the guide are as bad in this respect as others.
Rating:
Summary: Organization problems hurt this otherwise good series
Review: Like other reviewers, I found that the Rough Guides had both positive and negative aspects, overall making it a book that I would recommend, but only with another guide to balance it out. I found the detailed write-ups of indivdiual cities helpful--there's no skimping on everything you need for a well-informed orientation. You get more of that here than in any other guide out there, with the possible exception of the text-exclusive Blue Guides. The lack of pictures doesn't bother me; most of those tourist, photo-op shots are silly and misleading anyway and they just expand a book's girth. The Rough Guides are already big and heavy to carry without tons of useless pictures. In using RG during a four-month stay in France and Italy, I found that the most troublesome issue for me was simply the organization--it's not the type of guide you can pull out and immediately go to clearly marked sections and subsections to find info. This is especially a hinderance when looking through a city's transportation information. You have to wade through paragraphs to find the information buried somewhere in the middle. That might be ok if you have hours to pick though every sentence in the section on Rome, but if you're traveling quickly, or changing plans and need the info now--good luck. A restructuring of the format to more distinctly separate and highlight areas of information would do wonders for this series and would instantly make it so much better. Lonely Planet actually does this much more successfully. The directions on how to get to a place are also sometimes uneccessarily difficult. Maps are a bit small and difficult to read, too. Overall it is a good guide that is less user-friendly than it could be. Use it along with something else.
Rating:
Summary: the best
Review: Now, a lot of people want their guidebooks to be long lists of hotels plus a list of the authors' idea of the most important places. If, however, you don't plan your itinerary ahead, so you always seem to end up at the hostel cause that's the only open place left, accomadation listings are less important. Let's Go usually has more extensive budget sleeps, but neither it nor Lonely Planet can compare for the coverage of out of the way places. Some people want a guidebook with lots of pictures to show them where they want to go. Rough Guides you have to read, and you have to read them carefully. There's a certain skill involved, because they don't show a strong ranking of "desirableness," and they don't shy from the less-perfect sides of what is, after all, a real, contemporary country, not a museum. The upside (and it's a big upside) is that you can find places that never make it into the other books. I was in Italy last summer, and I spent days in Gubbio (in Umbria), and Peschici (in Puglia). When I'd talk to people in hostels later on in big towns, they would never have heard of the places I'd loved, because they weren't mentioned in their guidebooks. There is so much more to Italy that what you can get out of an Insight Guide or a Let's Go, and you owe it to yourself to find some of it. Sure, it's heavy, and some of the maps are inferior, but there are a lot of them, and they're for places Let's Go has never seen.
Rating:
Summary: the best
Review: Now, a lot of people want their guidebooks to be long lists of hotels plus a list of the authors' idea of the most important places. If, however, you don't plan your itinerary ahead, so you always seem to end up at the hostel cause that's the only open place left, accomadation listings are less important. Let's Go usually has more extensive budget sleeps, but neither it nor Lonely Planet can compare for the coverage of out of the way places. Some people want a guidebook with lots of pictures to show them where they want to go. Rough Guides you have to read, and you have to read them carefully. There's a certain skill involved, because they don't show a strong ranking of "desirableness," and they don't shy from the less-perfect sides of what is, after all, a real, contemporary country, not a museum. The upside (and it's a big upside) is that you can find places that never make it into the other books. I was in Italy last summer, and I spent days in Gubbio (in Umbria), and Peschici (in Puglia). When I'd talk to people in hostels later on in big towns, they would never have heard of the places I'd loved, because they weren't mentioned in their guidebooks. There is so much more to Italy that what you can get out of an Insight Guide or a Let's Go, and you owe it to yourself to find some of it. Sure, it's heavy, and some of the maps are inferior, but there are a lot of them, and they're for places Let's Go has never seen.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent
Review: The majority of reviewers have missed the point. This guide is a very useful, functional and easy to use guide in travelling around Italy. The guide concentrates on the basic stuff - the major things to see and do, hotels/accomodation, getting around. It's style is entertaining, which is very useful, especially sometimes when you are waiting for a train or bus that never arrives, and its necessary sometimes to have a sense of humour when traveling. The guide came in extremely useful. Its only draw back is its size, and its sometimes not recommended to drawn attention to your self when you need to pul out such a thick tourist guide.
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