Unlike many travel books, Paul and Kiki's Guide to Vacationing in Italy is written in a very personal narrative style that will help you go through the steps of planning your own itinerary to Italy to your favorite “must see” destinations, along with tips on how to make the most out of your vacation traveling time. And you are given enough information and tips to make up your own unique travel plans or you can just sit back, relax and replicate Paul and Kiki’s easy-to-follow vacation plans in this book.
With over 100 beautiful full color photos, Paul and Kiki take you on an Italian vacation through Rome, Tivoli, Naples, Florence, and Pisa. This guide has included all the information you need on where to stay and eat, how to get around, where to shop, where to go and what to see. They also include where not to go (which is very important as you will see when you read this book) and information on what to do and who to contact in case of emergencies. And being seasoned world travelers who have taken a number of guests with them on several trips, they understand the information and important tips that are needed by those people who are not highly familiar with traveling to Italy. Paul and Kiki give you information that you do not want to miss on some of the best deals to look for that will save you money in food and other expenses while on your vacation.
Excerpt
Chapter 1:
Preparing for Your Trip To Italy
The golden rule of travel is that the more you prepare for your trip, the less stress you will have on your vacation. Maybe this does not always turn out to be so due to unexpected events, but we found it to be true for us on our trip to Italy. Since our trip was so much fun, we wanted to share with you how we went about planning for it, and our experience there. We hope this will assist you in making your vacation in Italy a treasured memory.
There are so many options for you in your travels to Italy, and our hope is that our book will give you some place to start in making your plans, and that you will find a few valuable nuggets of information contained within it that will make your trip more enjoyable. It is so exciting to be planning a trip to Italy and for many of us it is a lifetime dream coming true. It can also be quite daunting to know where to start in the planning of your journeys, especially if you are new to international travel, and we hope this chapter will give you some insights that lead you in a positive direction for a successful and happy trip.
Time is your friend when planning a big trip. Although we have met people who were able to wing it, they are rare. There are people who can get off the plane in Rome, rent a car, and drive all over Italy for three or four weeks. None of us are one of those people.
First off, we're not confident about driving in Italy. We know enough to have noticed that the rules for driving in the northern part of Italy are very different from those in the southern areas. The transition is probably fairly smooth since in the middle of the boot the rules appear pretty much half-and-half. But exactly what those rules are remains a mystery to us. The people we've met who drove through Italy either had family in Italy and traveled with them, or spoke Italian and had lived in Italy for several years, so they were already familiar with driving in Italy. For everyone else (like us), it's probably better to travel by other means.
If you travel out of the cities into the country (easy to do by car or train), you'll find far fewer English speakers. Italians are wonderful communicators, so you'll probably be able to communicate with a lot of people, and most of the time it will be great fun. But you should make an effort to learn at least a few helpful Italian words, phrases, and numbers, which you need to know for money and for addresses (we'll cover some of these later in this chapter).
Professional Reviews
All You Need For Italy
Travel and tourism is the world’s largest industry which may explain why too many book publishers think their readers want 600 page tomes on travel. Just not so. Here’s a concise book that gives you what you need to experience Italy. There’s a very old saying, “See Rome and die” and its cousin "Vedi Napoli e poi muori!” credited to both Goethe and to the good people of Napoli. Kiki and Paul will have you saying. “See Italy and live.”
review on Amazon by By K. Comaskey
Comprehensive, concise, readable, and simply an excellent vacationing guide.
No one can speak with more authority about a country and what that country holds and offers to its visitors than the one who speaks from his/her own personal experience. And authors of this meticulously and eloquently written vacationing guide in Italy have proven just that. As seasoned travelers, they were able to comprehensively and concisely deliver all what one needs to have an enchanted, smooth, and full-flavored holiday in Tuscany, the heart of Italy.
Apart from thoughtfully written contents, from preparing for your trip to making your itinerary to where to stay and where to eat, even tips how to avoid being pickpocketed and how to combat jetlag, as well as emergency information and Embassy services, and more besides, this book also contains lovely complimentary colored photos taken by the authors, illustrating their personal experiences. Just by reading the book itself, it is almost like taking a little mini-trip to Italy.
Although I’ve been to Italy a few times myself, and thought I had seen it all, yet I find this book to be a complete guide for my future Italian holidays. In a word, a unique treasure among guides to vacationing in Italy. A must have!
review on Goodreads by Teuta S. Rizaj: author of The Rhapsody of the Ant Woman: Poem with Complimentary Drawings & The Sliced Land and Other Stories
Nicely written, full of information
Nicely written, full of information. I like the where's, where to stay where not ,where to go where you shouldn't go. Very useful book on travel.
Expands beyond the safety of pages bound by predictability to explore and often confirm exciting creative possibilities. A shimmering collage of memoir, creative nonfiction, literary journalism, and dizzying flights into poetic observation, this is t
