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Title: Blue Guide Tuscany (Tuscany, 4th Ed) by Alta MacAdam, Colin Ross ISBN: 0-393-32345-5 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: May, 2002 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 5 (3 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: If You Really Want to See Tuscany...
Comment: If you really want to see Tuscany, this it: this book will take you to places you wouldn't find any other way, from charming villages that are way off the beaten track, down colorful streets and staircases to hidden piazzi that you would have walked right past, into courtyards, and out to ancient country churches with masterpieces on the altar. The Blue Guide to Tuscany is 510 pages long, plus two indexes: the author, Alta Macadam, has apparently combed every city, town and hamlet in Tuscany, traveled every road and lane, wangled her way into every locked church and described its treasures, and surveyed every provincial museum. She includes practically everything of any interest at all in the entire province of Tuscany, including the provenance of every work of art and the programs of the frescoes and carvings in every church and abbey, and notes on the contents of every museum. She gives extensive information on the architecture of Tuscany's buildings, including many floor plans, and good notes on local history. It is organized geographically, with town and city tours, and lots of maps. I heard many guides giving their talks on our visit, and very few of them had more to say about anything that Ms. Macadam or were more informative; many of the places she described exhaustively had neither guides nor tourists besides ourselves, which in Tuscany is unusual.
Her directions can be a bit cryptic at times, but if you read carefully, you'll get used to them. As in all of the Blue Guides, she is prone to understatement: when, for example, speaking of the old town in Certaldo, she says that "the upper town has considerable charm", what she means is that it is ravishingly beautiful, will charm your senses and lift your spirit, and your friends and family will envy your photos and your vacation forever.
Caveats: some people will find this guide to be overwhelming. Because it is so dense and exhaustive, use it to plan your trip before you leave or you'll be buried in minutiae and miss things you'll have wanted very much to see.
Rating: 5
Summary: Great guidebook for exploring Tuscany
Comment: I just returned from a trip to Italy which included 4 days in Umbria and 8 days in Tuscany. I found the Blue Guides for both regions outstanding. Not surprisingly, both are quite worn (the best sign of a useful guidebook).
What makes this guidebook stand out is the incredible breadth of coverage of all tourist sites in Tuscany, making it quite thick, but not particularly heavy. (The only guide that I have seen that even comes close in terms of coverage is the Michelin Green Guide for Tuscany.) Each chapter represents a tour which covers either a town and its vicinity or a driving circuit. Within each tour, every conceivable tourist destination is identified, including small towns, churches, squares, public buildings, museums, archeological sites, etc. For significant museums and churches, the guide directs you through the works in a logical order. For the most part, individual works/objects are listed but not discussed, but notable works are identified with asterisks. Particularly remarkable works, such as Cathedrals and great fresco cycles, are discussed in more detail.
If you are interested in Italian art, architecture, and ancient history, then this book tells you where to find it in Tuscany, and provides brief descriptions. The guidebook does not teach you the history of art and architecture in Tuscany, nor should it. For this, you will need to do some additional reading.
Fine maps and a brief history are provided for each significant town. Parking advise is provided for most towns, and I strongly suggest you follow this advise. (I learned this the hard way.) Also pay close attention to the opening hours, which are quite accurate. The guide's hotel and restaurant recommendations seem quite good; they overlap significantly with the Michelin Red Guide and Frommers. Unfortunately, no descriptions or prices are provided, so most people will want another guidebook for this use. Some of the site closure information was out of date, but I expect this to be updated with the 2000 edition.
Rating: 5
Summary: The best series of books available for art lovers.
Comment: The Blue Guide series focuses on art. If you are looking for hotels, shopping, restaurants, or for entertaining reading, rely on something else. If you're looking for a serious guide to history, art, and architecture, both the well-known and the quietly tucked away, a list of hours and days open for musuems, holidays (often to be avoided!), as well as addresses of libraries and research insitutions, the Blue Guides are for you. They cover almost every artwork in the various regions, and do so accurately. The books guide the reader systematically through churches and museums and include accurate floor plans. Towns are grouped into touring areas, as are neighborhoods in the large cities. Town maps, even for little places, are plentiful and precise, even for the winding streets of Siena. City maps, such as Florence, are equally precise and inclusive, but they are split among several pages, which can make them harder to follow --- a minor flaw. I use Blue Guides as a textbook for my college students, and I never go to Italy without at least one!
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Title: Blue Guide Florence, Eighth Edition (Blue Guides) by Alta MacAdam ISBN: 0393322025 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: July, 2001 List Price(USD): $22.95 |
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Title: Blue Guide Umbria, Fourth Edition by Alta MacAdam ISBN: 0393324745 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: April, 2003 List Price(USD): $22.95 |
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Title: Blue Guide Rome, Eighth Edition by Alta MacAdam ISBN: 0393324737 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: May, 2003 List Price(USD): $26.95 |
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Title: Walking and Eating in Tuscany and Umbria by James Ladsun, Pia Davis, James Lasdun ISBN: 0140264604 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: April, 1997 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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Title: Blue Guide Northern Italy: From the Alps to Bologna, Eleventh Edition (Blue Guides) by Paul Blanchard ISBN: 039332141X Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: January, 2001 List Price(USD): $26.95 |
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