Fodor's Essential Italy: Rome, Florence, Venice & the Top Spots in Between (Full-color Travel Guide) Paperback – December 4, 2012

In addition to her Tuscany memoirs, Every Day in Tuscany, Under the Tuscan Sun, and Bella Tuscany, Frances Mayes is the author of the travel memoir A Year in the World; the illustrated books In Tuscany and Bringing Tuscany Home; Swan, a novel; The Discovery of Poetry, a text for readers; and five books of poetry. She divides her time between homes in Italy and North Carolina. Read her review of Fodor's Essential Italy:

Experienced travelers know how to pack. Two-week trip with a carry on? Not a problem. The keys are versatility, layers, and coordination. Those are the virtues, too, of Essential Italy. This compact guide parallels the basic suits, the many-colored tops, the scarves and accessories: all you need to travel well. Here are 500 pages of lively and accurate information. Reading it, I recalled a thousand images, yes, but most of all a sense of adventure. The pages are imbued with a sense of fun from the outset. Andiamo!

Start with the grand centers, the writers advise--Rome, Florence, and Venice--then improvise from there. The difficulty is choosing. Italy is so abundantly rich in beauty, art, history, music, architecture, cuisine, and wine that you need a dozen lifetimes to say I know Italy well. I have lived there for part of every year for the last twenty and still it seems new each time I arrive.

We’re wise to begin in Roma, since all roads lead there anyway. The writers are savvy guides. I was a little surprised to see a hotel and several restaurants that I considered my finds described and even awarded “Fodor’s Choice” spots. Rome is not formidable. After a couple of days there, you realize it’s an expanded small town; you can walk easily to most of the major sites. Essential Italy will lead you to the very best cafés and gelato stops when you’re ready to rest. The historic center you can experience in three days. Leave a few other days to wander the rest of the city and to sit in the Borghese gardens and pretend that you’re a Roman. Those private moments of discovery are all yours.

Same with Florence and Venice. The sites and art will imprint on your mind for a lifetime. So will the tiny monastery garden, the reflections in the Arno at dawn, the languid air of Torcello, the dark wine sipped by the Grand Canal at midnight. These cities are ancient bastions of western civilization. They’re also enchanting--not at all languishing in history but pulsing with contemporary tempo. In some spot along the way you may feel yourself pulled to just stay--a month or a decade. I’ve heard one curious thing many times from travelers to Italy. They say the place seems always to have been waiting for them. One woman told me, “I got out of the taxi in Florence and my first thought was I want to come back.” She’d just arrived!

What will it be? Hiking in Cinque Terre? Photographing Palladio’s Villa Rotonda? Bicycling around flat Ravenna? Gazing at Signorelli frescos in Orvieto? Taking a cooking class in Bologna? For any choice, this guide is a trusty companion. I predict you’ll have a fabulous trip. It’s Italy, after all. Make yourself at home.