Lonely Planet will get you to the heart of Italy, with amazing travel experiences and the best planning advice. Italy is an extraordinary feast of heart-thumping, soul-stirring art, food and landscapes rivalled by few and coveted by millions.
Take in a gondolier’s sweet song while gliding past Venetian palaces, sample olives and wines as you traverse Tuscany’s storybook hills, or be humbled amid thousands of years of Roman history and art; all with your trusted travel companion. Get to the heart of Italy now!
Inside Lonely Planet Italy Travel Guide:
Full-colour maps and images throughout
Highlights and itineraries help you tailor your trip to your personal needs and interests
Insider tips to save time and money and get around like a local, avoiding crowds and trouble spots
Essential info at your fingertips - hours of operation, phone numbers, websites, transit tips, prices
Honest reviews for all budgets - eating, sleeping, sight-seeing, going out, shopping, hidden gems that most guidebooks miss
Cultural insights give you a richer, more rewarding travel experience - including history, art, literature, cinema, music, architecture, politics, cuisine, wine, customs
Free, convenient pull-out Rome map (included in print version), plus over 137 colour maps
Covers: Rome, Turin, Piedmont, the Italian Riviera, Milan, the Lakes, Dolomites, Venice, Emilia-Romagna, Florence, Tuscany, Umbria, Abruzzo, Naples, Campania, Puglia, Sicily, Sardinia and more
Author Info
Cristian Bonetto:Cristian has contributed to over 30 Lonely Planet guides to date, including New York City, Italy, Venice & the Veneto, Naples & the Amalfi Coast, Denmark, Copenhagen, Sweden and Singapore. Lonely Planet work aside, his musings on travel, food, culture and design appear in numerous publications around the world, including The Telegraph (UK) and Corriere del Mezzogiorno (Italy). When not on the road, you'll find the reformed playwright and TV scriptwriter slurping espresso in his beloved hometown, Melbourne. Instagram: rexcat75.Donna Wheeler:Donna has written guidebooks for Lonely Planet for ten years, including the Italy, Norway, Belgium, Africa, Tunisia, Algeria, France and Melbourne titles. She is the author of Paris Precincts, a curated photographic guide to the city's best bars, restaurants and shops and is reporter for Italian contemporary art publisher My Art Guides. Donna's work on contemporary art, architecture and design, food, wine, wilderness areas and cultural history also can be found in a variety of other publications. She became a travel writer after various careers as a commissioning editor, creative director, digital producer and content strategist.Born and bred in Sydney, Australia, Donna fell in love with Melbourne’s moody bluestone streets as a teenage art student. She has divided her time between there and her home town for over two decades, along with residential stints in Turin, Paris, Bordeaux, New York, London and rural Ireland. Donna travels widely (and deeply) in Europe, North Africa, the US and Asia.Belinda Dixon:Only really happy when her feet are suitably sandy, Belinda has been (gleefully) travelling, researching and writing for Lonely Planet since 2006. It’s seen her marvelling at Stonehenge at sunrise; scrambling up Italian mountain paths; horse riding across Donegal’s golden sands; kayaking down south Devon rivers; gazing at Verona’s frescoes; soaking in a spa in Bath; fossil hunting on Dorset’s Jurassic Coast. A trained radio journalist, her innate nosiness means few likely-looking sleep spots go unexplored. And then there’s the food and drink: truffled mushroom pasta in Salo; whisky in Aberdeen, Balti in Birmingham, grilled fish in Dartmouth; wine in Bardolino. And all in the name of research …Brendan Sainsbury: Born and raised in the UK in a town that never merits a mention in any guidebook (Andover, Hampshire), Brendan spent the holidays of his youth caravanning in the English Lake District and didn’t leave Blighty until he was nineteen. Making up for lost time, he’s since squeezed 70 countries into a sometimes precarious existence as a writer and professional vagabond. His rocking chair memories will probably include staging a performance of ‘A Comedy of Errors’ at a school in war-torn Angola, running 150 miles across the Sahara Desert in the Marathon des Sables, and hitchhiking from Cape Town to Kilimanjaro with an early, dog-eared copy of LP’s Africa on a Shoestring. In the last eleven years, he has written over 40 books for Lonely Planet from Castro’s Cuba to the canyons of Peru. When not scribbling research notes, Brendan likes partaking in ridiculous ‘endurance’ races, strumming old Clash songs on the guitar, and experiencing the pain and occasional pleasures of following Southampton Football Club.Kerry Christiani:Kerry is an award-winning travel writer and Lonely Planet author, specialising in Central Europe, the Mediterranean and Morocco. She lives in the beautiful Black Forest, Germany, with her husband Andy Christiani ([Link Removed] a freelance travel photographer.Fresh from a degree in modern languages and linguistics, Kerry left Essex in 2000 for a grand Tour d'Europe with a bubble caravan, a crazy German named Andy (see above) and a stash of well-thumbed Lonely Planet guides. She never looked back. Following stints as a teacher, translator, grape picker, vegetable farmer, children's entertainer, Oktoberfest waitress, failed busker and odd-jobber extraordinaire, Kerry finally turned her passion for travel and writing into a career.Eleven years, six continents and an MA later, Kerry has authored some 20 guidebooks - including the Lonely Planet titles listed below - and has written for Lonely Planet Magazine and the Lonely Planet.com blog. Kerry also contributes to numerous other travel publications, both in print and online.Guidebooks authored: Germany Austria Switzerland Lisbon Encounter Munich, Bavaria & the Black Forest Best in Travel 2009 The Europe Book.Nicola Williams:Border-hopping is a way of life for British writer Nicola Williams who lives in a French lakeside village on the southern side of Lake Geneva. Hunting for Tuscan white truffles, meeting melon farmers in Provence, dining incognito in the next best Parisian bistro and drinking with experimental winemakers in Languedoc is part and parcel of her work as Lonely Planet author, independent travel writer and editorial consultant. France, Switzerland and Italy is where she is most.Nicola has authored more than 30 guidebooks for Lonely Planet and regularly consults on editorial projects for its London and Melbourne offices. She also writes for lonelyplanet.com, BBC's Lonely Planet Magazine, French Magazine, Cool Camping France and Cool Camping Europe.Nicola started out in the early 1990s bussing and boating it from Jakarta to East Timor to document the civil war. As a singleton living the high life in a then-undiscovered Vilnius, she clocked up weeks of night-train travel in Russia, Ukraine and Eastern Europe as a writer and editor for European city-guide publisher In Your Pocket.Two decades on, her own passion for architecture and design, a social-media junkie husband mad about offbeat festivals, and three young tri-lingual children with ants in their pants ensures travel with a skip in its step every time.Duncan Garwood:It was a classic backpacking trip around the Greek islands that first introduced Duncan to the delights of the Mediterranean. Several years later a chance encounter in a London pub led him to head off to Bari on Italy's Adriatic coast.After two years in southern Italy he moved again, this time to Rome, where he's been ever since. He currently lives with his Italian wife and two kids in the Castelli Albani, just south of the capital.Since 2002 he has written and contributed to a raft of LP guides, including Rome, Naples & the Amalfi Coast, Sardinia, Sicily, Piedmont, Italy, Italy's Best Trips, Bilbao & San Sebastian, Mediterranean Europe, Western Europe and Europe on a Shoestring.He has also contributed to Blue List 2008; The Europe Book; Street Food; Food Lover's Guide to the World, and written on Italy for newspapers, publications, and websites, including The Independent, The Times, Lonely Planet magazine, Olive, lonelyplanet.com and bbc.com/travel.Gregor Clark:Gregor Clark is a US-based writer whose love of foreign languages and curiosity about what's around the next bend have taken him to dozens of countries on five continents. Chronic wanderlust has also led him to visit all 50 states and most Canadian provinces on countless road trips through his native North America.Since 2000, Gregor has regularly contributed to Lonely Planet guides, with a focus on Europe and the Americas. Titles include Italy, France, Brazil, Costa Rica, Argentina, Portugal, Switzerland, Mexico, South America on a Shoestring, Montreal & Quebec City, France Trips, New England Trips, cycling guides to Italy and California and coffee-table pictorials such as The USA Book and The LP Guide to the Middle of Nowhere.A polyglot since early childhood, Gregor earned his degree in Romance Languages at Stanford University and has remained an avid linguist throughout careers in international publishing, teaching, translation and tour leadership. He continues to favor destinations such as Brazil and Italy where he can hit the streets speaking the local vernacular, but he's also cycled around Bali, swum with penguins and sharks in the Galapagos, trekked in the Himalayas, repaired his bike with duct tape in the middle of the Wyoming desert, cruised the icy shores of Greenland and published articles about places as far-flung and disparate as Tonga and North Dakota.
