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| A classic Tuscan farmhouse (casa colonica) |
www.bella-toscana.com (1998) is a travel guide website containing a mass of useful and information on Tuscany - architecture, history, food, wine, accommodation as well as links to tourist information websites about individual towns throughout the region. Their map of Tuscany has similar links to towns, monasteries, villas, mountains and other geographical points of interest to tourists in Tuscany and also Umbria.
Another excellent Chianti travel guide is www.chianti.info (2001). Despite its name, this travel guide website covers not only Chianti but provides tourist information on other parts of Tuscany. Do you want to gather, or simply eat, porcini mushrooms? To grill, or simply eat, a bistecca alla fiorentina? Learn about the history of the part of Tuscany known as Chianti? This site is for you!
Two smaller, more recent but increasingly popular travel guide sites are www.chianti-italy.com and www.tuscanyitaly.com. The former provides a list of air conditioned vacation rentals among other things, while the latter offers a comprehensive list of events and fairs, and a list of market days throughout Tuscany.
My recommendations for the best Tuscany guide books are:
- for those interested in the details of history and architecture, the Blue Guides, namely Blue Guide Florence and Blue Guide Tuscany. These are excellent scholarly guide books.
- for those who prefer diagrams more than text, the best guide book, in my opinion, is the Eyewitness Travel Guide: Florence & Tuscany. This is quite a weighty book to carry but it's packed with excellent illustrated maps, cut-away illustrations of architecture and so on.
I have assembled a comprehensive list of Tuscany travel guide books available from Amazon here. Titles and some reviews of more specific interests are as follows:
Some general Tuscany guide books.
Cycling in Tuscany.
Hiking in Tuscany.
Gardens of Tuscany.
Orchids in Tuscany
Author: Anna Maria Baldini
