A guide book should
1. review hotels, with phone numbers, email, website, closing seasons, price, and comments on quality;
2. review restaurants, with cuisine, price, phone numbers, email, website, and closing times and days;
3. have maps of towns with detailed and labeled streets (including one-way), marked with recommended hotels, restaurants, parking, and sites;
4. good regional maps for driving;
5. drawn or photographed areas for orientation;
6. printed plans of museums (with opening times and days) and identifying diagrams of detailed art works;
7. religious notes;
8. and detailed discussion of the picturesque, the beautiful, the sublime - in nature and the arts - for the plucky, intelligent, curious, willing-to-learn, urbane, cosmopolitan traveler, done with a sense of history.
The reader of this review should know that for me #8 outweighs all the others put together. For ##1-6 there are probably better travel books than The Blue Guides, the latter treating these matters a bit too cursory. A brief thumb-through in a large bookstore will tell which other guidebooks might meet these criteria - though British books are better than American, the British a less parochial and better educated people (perhaps I should add: I live in the South of the US). There are certainly better guidebooks for #7. Yet for #8, in English (those in German are better, the Germans an even more cosmopolitan and urbane people), The Blue Guides are the best, at least for those books most regularly updated. I have bought them for years and for every destination traveled. The Blue Guides are also kind enough to put the date of publication in the front, unlike the guidebooks of assorted confidence men and hucksters - a testimonial to the Blue Guide's integrity.
The _Blue Guide Southern Italy_, 2007 (11th ed.), has 584 pages, of which the first 289 are Campania. Basilicata is covered in pages 291-318, Calabria 319-368, Abruzzo and Molise together 369-428, and Puglia 427-528. Unlike earlier editions, Latium south of Rome is excluded, leaving one to hope that Latium-Beyond-Rome will be a future Blue Guide. There are a copious index, a glossary of special terms, diagrams of the classical orders, and historical charts. Maps of many towns are provided. Just enough photos are included without the text turning into a glossy coffee table tome, and there are floor plans of important museums and churches. Usually how-to-get-there by means of train, bus, and car is discussed. The description of #8, especially with respect to the arts, is good - the book's real selling point. And it's not printed on cheap paper.
Puglia deserves a book of its own, and another for Basilicata and Calabria. Perhaps the British and Irish don't go there (Blue Guides are published in the UK). The recent publication of a _Blue Guide Marche_ leads one to hope. |
Blue Guide Southern Italy, Eleventh Edition (Blue Guides) Books In Print, Audio Books.