Blue Guide Venice

The best got better

Rating Star: 5

Reviewed by Jeff Cotton
Format: Paperback

You know what to expect from a Blue Guide – a solid and detailed survey of the art and architecture, free of pretension, fashion and recommendations of what’s ‘happening’. And so this new edition is satisfying and unsurprising, except it’s now illustrated fully in colour! And not just the photos – the maps, plans and drawings get a clarifying colourful spruce up too. It’s like a Dorling Kindersley guide mated with a Blue Guide. Almost, there’s still more text than pics. Anyway, this guide is now even more the best to get.

Blue Guide Venice and the Veneto

Blue Guide Must-Haves for Italy

Rating Star: 5

Reviewed by mikelb
Format: Paperback

Having known the more massive Blue Guides of the past (e.g., one for all of Northern Italy), I just recently discovered these smaller, separate regional guides and bought not only this one but also those for Sicily and Emilia-Romagna; a new one for Lombardy is due out shortly. They are not geared to mass travel or all the practicalities of travel to Italy’s main tourist centers; for that sort of guide you can resort to the “Big 5” (or more) guides. Rather, these Blue Guides are strongly geared to the voyager with strong orientation to the art, history and culture (and natural beauties too) of Italy, and an appetite to go a bit off-the-beaten tourist path, as that’s where some of the greatest treasures are to be found.

The value of these Blue Guides is to delve deeper than the “Big 5” guides don’t or can’t. The Blue Guides are wonderful for digging out smaller or undiscovered treasures that no traveler would be likely to find alone — a town or a church or museum or neighborhood, let’s say, that may be a real revelation. Many of those are places most tourists never get to — and may not even know about — but that is not to say they are minor in any way. They may in fact be priceless culturally.

For comparison, I consulted a very recent edition of one of the Big 5 — the Rick Steves 2017 Italy Guide, which is packed with useful information in its nearly 1200 pages, and very well presented; from a practical point of view, I think this may be the best of the Big guides today. But consider what it does not find space for and never even mentions: even close to Milan which does get coverage, no mention of Pavia, for example, with its famous monastery, or Bergamo, or Brescia, or Cremona; a bit further afield, no treatment at all of Piacenza, Modena, Parma, the major city of Bologna, Mantua, Ferrara. All unique, all with wonderful things to see and experience, and many of them with a more intimate atmosphere than the big tourist cities.

So, for some of us, who would consider places like those to be “essential,” the Blue Guides are essential too, not as substitutes but rather as supplements to the big, practical guides. You may still need Rick Steves to teach you some ins and outs of travel in Italy, but the Blue Guides will help you find an exquisite out-of-the-way chapel or Renaissance palace or miraculous piece of art or priceless jewel of a piazza you would otherwise miss — and that you can explore without hordes of other tourists around you. PS the Blue Guides are cleanly organized and clearly and elegantly researched and written — VERY comprehensive for the areas they cover. I love them!

Blue Guide Venice

The Best Venice Guide

Rating Star: 5

Reviewed by Bruce Coles
Format: Paperback

This is the best guide to Venice for anyone who wants to go beyond the crowds on St Marks Square and discover the great art and architecture. The Blue Guides are an excellent series and highly recommended.

Blue Guide Venice

Best guide

Rating Star: 5

Reviewed by Susie P.
Format: Kindle ebook

The best guide on Venice! Every recommendations checked out, and the descriptions of the sites (and sights) were excellent. Alta really knows the city.

Blue Guide Venice

The best series of guide books are now better than ever

Rating Star: 5

Reviewed by Marco M
Format: Paperback

This is the first of the ‘rebooted’ Blue Guides I’ve bought. After going down the pretty looking, more populist route, Blue Guides are now back on track!

This is absolutely the best guide book to Venice available today. Let’s be honest here – one goes to Venice for her history, art and architecture, not for a week of lying on a beach at a resort. Blue Guides are unapologetically concerned with detailed information on every building and artwork you will see in a city. This guide is stuffed full of the most interesting information about everything imaginable relating to Venice, her art and her glorious past. Not just who painted what and who built that, but facinating titbits of trivia that brings the most beautiful city on Earth alive.

I have taken past editions of Blue Guides to Venice many times over the last 10 years, but this is the best so far. I thought I knew Venice inside out – my last trip there (for 8 days) revealed so much more that I didn’t know, all thanks to this brilliant guide. It really makes every other guide book on the market look like an article in a magazine.

Now I have to buy the rebooted Blue Guide to Rome for my upcoming trip back to the Eternal City!