Traveling in Italy

My friend and colleague Gary Wockner writes to ask about any secret knowledge I might have of Italy, a country I've visited many times and lived in for several too-short spells of a few months apiece. His query makes a good occasion to list some of the best information sources I know about Italy.

For general travel, I first turn to Travel Intelligence, a London-based syndicate for which I'm a correspondent. There are more than a hundred other correspondents, and they offer astonishing secrets of their own.

You can't do much better, I think, than the Lonely Planet guides, and the one for Italy is no exception. It's one of the only guidebooks I don't mind being seen carrying, and it's pointed me to some places I might not otherwise have visited--Orvieto, for one, which is now among my favorite places. Another top-flight and unembarrassing guidebook, to which I contributed a few pages, is City Secrets: Florence, Venice, and the Towns of Italy, which reveals quite a few off-the-beaten-track venues. Its companion volume, City Secrets: Rome, is indispensable for visitors to that city, as is Georgina Masson and John Fort's Companion Guide to Rome.

For a general sense of Italian culture, Luigi Barzini's The Italians is somewhat dated but still useful and entertaining. So, too, are Carlo Levi's Christ Stopped in Eboli and Words Are Stones, about Basilicata (on the far southern mainland) and Sicily, respectively. For the north--specifically, Verona--Tim Parks's Italian Neighbors is quite good. And if you don't feel overwhelmed by the Anglicization of Tuscany, Frances Mayes's Under the Tuscan Sun is an instructive treat. (It's okay to cheat and watch the film, with the always wonderful Diane Lane.)

More to come. But for the moment, one final recommendation for airplane reading that doesn't get much better: Suetonius's The Twelve Caesars, a kind of Godfather for the second century, with plenty of useful lessons for us all.