What do you think?
Rate this book
Rick Steves Best of Italy
Hit Italy's can't-miss art, sights, and bites in two weeks or less with Rick Steves Best of Italy! Experience Italy's Old World romance and New World excitement for yourself with Rick Steves Best of Italy!
Planning a longer trip? Pick up Rick Steves Italy , an in-depth guide perfect for spending more than two weeks exploring Italy.
Planning a longer trip? Pick up Rick Steves Italy , an in-depth guide perfect for spending more than two weeks exploring Italy.
- GenresTravelNonfictionItaly
528 pages, Paperback
First published May 14, 2016
316 people are currently reading
107 people want to read
About the author
Rick Steves
567 books685 followersRick Steves is an American travel writer, television personality, and activist known for encouraging meaningful travel that emphasizes cultural immersion and thoughtful global citizenship. Born in California and raised in Edmonds, Washington, he began traveling in his teens, inspired by a family trip to Europe. After graduating from the University of Washington with a degree in European history and business, Steves started teaching travel classes, which led to his first guidebook, Europe Through the Back Door, self-published in 1980.
Steves built his Edmonds-based travel company on the idea that travelers should explore less-touristy areas and engage with local cultures. He gained national prominence as host and producer of Rick Steves' Europe, which has aired on public television since 2000. He also hosts a weekly public radio show, Travel with Rick Steves, and has authored dozens of popular guidebooks, including bestselling titles on Italy and Europe at large.
Beyond travel, Steves is an outspoken advocate for drug policy reform, environmental sustainability, and social justice. He supports marijuana legalization and chairs the board of NORML. He has funded housing for homeless families and donates to anti-hunger and arts organizations. In 2019, he pledged $1 million annually to offset the carbon emissions of his tour groups.
Steves is a practicing Lutheran with Norwegian ancestry and continues to live in Edmonds. He has two adult children and is in a relationship with Reverend Shelley Bryan Wee. Despite health challenges, including a prostate cancer diagnosis in 2024, Steves remains committed to his mission of helping Americans travel with greater purpose, empathy, and understanding of the world. His work reflects a belief that travel, done right, can be both transformative and a force for peace.
Steves built his Edmonds-based travel company on the idea that travelers should explore less-touristy areas and engage with local cultures. He gained national prominence as host and producer of Rick Steves' Europe, which has aired on public television since 2000. He also hosts a weekly public radio show, Travel with Rick Steves, and has authored dozens of popular guidebooks, including bestselling titles on Italy and Europe at large.
Beyond travel, Steves is an outspoken advocate for drug policy reform, environmental sustainability, and social justice. He supports marijuana legalization and chairs the board of NORML. He has funded housing for homeless families and donates to anti-hunger and arts organizations. In 2019, he pledged $1 million annually to offset the carbon emissions of his tour groups.
Steves is a practicing Lutheran with Norwegian ancestry and continues to live in Edmonds. He has two adult children and is in a relationship with Reverend Shelley Bryan Wee. Despite health challenges, including a prostate cancer diagnosis in 2024, Steves remains committed to his mission of helping Americans travel with greater purpose, empathy, and understanding of the world. His work reflects a belief that travel, done right, can be both transformative and a force for peace.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews
April 8, 2019
Used it for my recent trip to Naples, Amalfi Coast and Rome (as these are 2 of the 6 destinations chosen here) and as usual in a Rick Steves guide, the book was excellent and very helpful as here it fit our tastes very well - as these guide books tend to be quite opinionated (which is a plus for me), it matters a lot how well the choices of Rick Steves' team match to one's preferences and for us, it worked in most guides
Highlights - everything recommended in Rome was perfect for us (including the two walks which were great) as was Naples and Pompeii, while the Amalfi coast was a bit overrated by the guide imho - the drive was a great but quite stressful experience and while Ravello was awesome, Amalfi was very commercial and nothing really to miss except for its waterfront which has awesome views
Some prices differ a little from what is noted in the book (published 2018 - and there are updates at Rick Steves' website if needed), while the only quibble was about the Circumvesiana train which didn't really seem unsafe the way portrayed there - maybe because it was early April, but in the morning was packed with tourists and commuters and in the evening (~9) when we came back, it felt safe, not that many people after the first few stations, but no dubious ones either
Overall as usual an excellent and fairly concise guide and highly recommended if your destination matches its choices
Highlights - everything recommended in Rome was perfect for us (including the two walks which were great) as was Naples and Pompeii, while the Amalfi coast was a bit overrated by the guide imho - the drive was a great but quite stressful experience and while Ravello was awesome, Amalfi was very commercial and nothing really to miss except for its waterfront which has awesome views
Some prices differ a little from what is noted in the book (published 2018 - and there are updates at Rick Steves' website if needed), while the only quibble was about the Circumvesiana train which didn't really seem unsafe the way portrayed there - maybe because it was early April, but in the morning was packed with tourists and commuters and in the evening (~9) when we came back, it felt safe, not that many people after the first few stations, but no dubious ones either
Overall as usual an excellent and fairly concise guide and highly recommended if your destination matches its choices
February 9, 2020
A fabulous travel guide to not only help you plan a trip to Italy, but to give you the tips and tricks you need to make it the best trip. I loved how he broke everything down - first into the different must see cities and regions, and then how to allocate your time in each place.
August 18, 2016
I used this book through out my whole 2 weeks in Italy. It's funny because we pretty much followed this book. We went to Venice, Florence, half day trip to Cinque Terre, the other half to Pisa, then Rome, Sorrento, and day trip to Capri.
We were able to do self tours because of this book. My husband read about things we were looking at and it made the experience that much better.
It also has great tips in here, we also used the "how to read a train ticket" and some phrases in Italian, as well as each regions food and drink speciality, recommended food places, the rules on tipping, and things to avoid, and how to by pass long lines.
It has rating on what to see and what's not that great.
The only thing that we didn't do that he recommended was the Roma Pass. Even our hotel concierge said its a waste of money and it was true. He said maybe a few years ago but not anymore. They also increased the price since this book came out and this book was published in May 2016.
This book was our bible for 2 weeks! I recommend it to everyone.
We sat in Barnes and Nobles and looked through Italy Books and this seemed like the best one, and to us, it was!
We were able to do self tours because of this book. My husband read about things we were looking at and it made the experience that much better.
It also has great tips in here, we also used the "how to read a train ticket" and some phrases in Italian, as well as each regions food and drink speciality, recommended food places, the rules on tipping, and things to avoid, and how to by pass long lines.
It has rating on what to see and what's not that great.
The only thing that we didn't do that he recommended was the Roma Pass. Even our hotel concierge said its a waste of money and it was true. He said maybe a few years ago but not anymore. They also increased the price since this book came out and this book was published in May 2016.
This book was our bible for 2 weeks! I recommend it to everyone.
We sat in Barnes and Nobles and looked through Italy Books and this seemed like the best one, and to us, it was!
August 2, 2016
A good reference for someone who is visiting Italy for the first time, and is overwhelmed by choice, or even the seasoned traveler who wants more information on particular areas. Rick Steves has done the work and picked out the top destinations.
April 7, 2022
This was so useful for planning our first trip to Italy! Most of the recommendations were spot on and it made it much easier to narrow down an itinerary, find great restaurants, etc. We also got the app and used the free audio tours at several locations. They were excellent!
December 23, 2025
Overall rating: 3.5/5 stars
This was my first experience with one of Rick's "Best of" guidebooks. I can see how it is helpful for people who are trying to narrow down trip options based on high-level overviews of main cities, but as a true guidebook it doesn't do trip-planning justice like the full guidebooks do. I would personally not rely on this book to plan the details of your trip, but it's good if you don't know where to start. My minor gripes include some lack of proofreading/editing (missing punctuation between sentences, some paragraphs even copy-paste on the same page) and the shininess of the paper used caused glares when trying to read with a lamp on.
Rick is still my go-to guy and I look forward to planning the finer details of my trip to Italy!
This was my first experience with one of Rick's "Best of" guidebooks. I can see how it is helpful for people who are trying to narrow down trip options based on high-level overviews of main cities, but as a true guidebook it doesn't do trip-planning justice like the full guidebooks do. I would personally not rely on this book to plan the details of your trip, but it's good if you don't know where to start. My minor gripes include some lack of proofreading/editing (missing punctuation between sentences, some paragraphs even copy-paste on the same page) and the shininess of the paper used caused glares when trying to read with a lamp on.
Rick is still my go-to guy and I look forward to planning the finer details of my trip to Italy!
April 10, 2025
Used this to help me plan a 2 week trip to Italy with my husband and parents. While I had lived in southern Italy for a year and a half and knew enough about transportation and restaurants and tourist sites for many of the places we visited, this book was crucial for filling in the gaps, like good hotels in those same areas, plus information on the parts of northern Italy we went to that I had never been to before. There's so much more to this book that I didn't even get an opportunity to use. Extremely helpful! Rick Steves' is my go-to for travel-planning.
May 16, 2019
Information overload! There’s so much I learned, too bad my memory isn’t better. It covered the major sites, almost all of which we are planning to see. Tons of helpful tips. I didn’t really use the hotel selections, but I did listen to areas of a city he recommended and then used online hotel and rental sites to find what was right for us. Looking forward to checking out his website and audio guides also.
November 28, 2019
This was the perfect travel choice for a trip this year that included Venice, Pompeii, Naples, and Positano. Rick provided depth to the places I'd already intended to go (like Pompeii), and he pointed me in directions I didn't have on my itinerary (like the archaeological museum in Naples) that turned out to be "must sees."
January 26, 2023
Great detailed info and helpful, practical tips! It is geared more toward budget travelers, so there’s not much on the luxury options available, but that’s not a dealbreaker. The maps and breakdowns of prioritizing sights is very useful!
March 12, 2023
Excellent advice before and during a recent trip to Venice, Pisa, Florence, Assisi, Rome, and Vatican City.
The links to the audio supplements were perfect and added extra nuance while wandering the cobblestone streets of Italy 🇮🇹
The links to the audio supplements were perfect and added extra nuance while wandering the cobblestone streets of Italy 🇮🇹
January 16, 2021
This book was such a great resource. I used it to plan my trip and during my trip anytime I needed it.
June 8, 2023
Lots of good ideas and "heads up."
March 24, 2024
I recently became a fan of Rick Steves and his European guidebooks for the everyday traveler, but be prepared: he will bluntly tell you what is worth seeing and what is a waste of time. To find his travel guides useful, you have to have the same mindset as he has: kinda leans towards budget travel and loves art more than anything else in Italy. Great suggestions for getting the most out of your trip. His self-guided tours can be hit or miss--they were quite detailed in his guide of Athens but had sparse information for some museums of Rome and Florence.
August 22, 2024
It was amazing! This book had everything we hoped for and more. Steves made our trip to Italy flawless!
November 22, 2024
Excellent guide highlighting major sites in Rome
March 27, 2024
This book had everything I needed to fully and confidently plan our trip. I’m so excited!!
February 10, 2020
Update: After actually travelling to Italy, I have increased my rating to 4 stars, since, thanks largely to Steves' advice, my travels in the destinations covered in detail in this book went entirely smoothly. However, in every other way I'm doubling down on what I initially wrote - you'll need some supplemental information on train bookings even if you're only going to the destinations covered in detail in this book, you'll need lots of supplemental information if you want to visit the Venice Biennale, and you should get a different book if you want to spend a significant amount of time in destinations not covered in detail in this book.
OP:
I wasn't sure I needed a new guide book - I own the 2015 edition of Steves' Best of Europe which covers almost all the Italian destinations I want to visit - but I decided to buy this because it was on special, because it was advertised as covering a couple of destinations I want to visit that aren't in BoE (Milan and Lake Como), and because I wanted to see if Steves really does regularly update his books as he claims!
Pros:
- just like BoE (which I really like, that's why I stuck with Steves rather than switching to Lonely Planet or Rough Guides), this book has lots of detail on things like how to use public transport - whilst Steves sometimes goes too far with the kid-gloves, I like that he errs towards assuming that you don't know things (RG, and even more so LP, err the other way)
- just like BoE, it's got lots of self-guided city walks and museum tours (but you don't actually have to buy the book to access many of these, you can just download Steves' free app!)
- I love the full color, it makes everything, particularly the self-guided walks, easier to follow
Cons:
- this is a 'best of' not only in that it only covers Steves' favorite destinations, but in that it only covers his favorite attractions, which means that there's even less than usual about things he isn't interested in (such as fine dining and contemporary art) - furthermore, this is not clearly spelled out in the advertising for this book!
- there's very little about Milan and Como (and the other destinations listed as 'best of the rest') - this too is not clearly spelled out in the advertising for this book!
- the updates are minor, there's really no need to buy this if you own a fairly recent edition of any Steves book that covers Italy
- the major change since the 2015 edition of BoE is a negative one - specific prices for different types of rooms aren't included, as a solo traveler who wants to know which hotels have cheap single rooms I was very annoyed about this!
- the annoyances present in BoE are here too - the information on booking long-distance trains is not very detailed (not too much of a problem, seat61.com has plenty of information) and the hotel coverage skews heavily towards indies (I do like indies, but in my experience they often have inefficient booking process and in some cities they offer less bang-for-buck than chains)
OP:
I wasn't sure I needed a new guide book - I own the 2015 edition of Steves' Best of Europe which covers almost all the Italian destinations I want to visit - but I decided to buy this because it was on special, because it was advertised as covering a couple of destinations I want to visit that aren't in BoE (Milan and Lake Como), and because I wanted to see if Steves really does regularly update his books as he claims!
Pros:
- just like BoE (which I really like, that's why I stuck with Steves rather than switching to Lonely Planet or Rough Guides), this book has lots of detail on things like how to use public transport - whilst Steves sometimes goes too far with the kid-gloves, I like that he errs towards assuming that you don't know things (RG, and even more so LP, err the other way)
- just like BoE, it's got lots of self-guided city walks and museum tours (but you don't actually have to buy the book to access many of these, you can just download Steves' free app!)
- I love the full color, it makes everything, particularly the self-guided walks, easier to follow
Cons:
- this is a 'best of' not only in that it only covers Steves' favorite destinations, but in that it only covers his favorite attractions, which means that there's even less than usual about things he isn't interested in (such as fine dining and contemporary art) - furthermore, this is not clearly spelled out in the advertising for this book!
- there's very little about Milan and Como (and the other destinations listed as 'best of the rest') - this too is not clearly spelled out in the advertising for this book!
- the updates are minor, there's really no need to buy this if you own a fairly recent edition of any Steves book that covers Italy
- the major change since the 2015 edition of BoE is a negative one - specific prices for different types of rooms aren't included, as a solo traveler who wants to know which hotels have cheap single rooms I was very annoyed about this!
- the annoyances present in BoE are here too - the information on booking long-distance trains is not very detailed (not too much of a problem, seat61.com has plenty of information) and the hotel coverage skews heavily towards indies (I do like indies, but in my experience they often have inefficient booking process and in some cities they offer less bang-for-buck than chains)
November 15, 2016
Rick's ego is enormous. every other paragraph was about his tour, his opinion, his audio, his his his. It turned me off. loved the pictures, most of the descriptions etc.
The thing is when you give a tip I need to personally know more about you. His tips throughout the book mean about as much as me asking a tourist whose eating at the Olive Garden after traveling to NYC to eat at the same place they could eat back home for a great Italian restaurant in my lovely city of NYC. Get it? Their opinion would mean diddley squat based on their dining choice (PS the OLIVE GARDEN is not Italian its a souped up version of McDonald's with red looking sauce) . the same goes for Rick's opinion. for all I know this guy is a right winger, Catholic, raised on a remote farm in alaska whose first trip out of the states was to Italy.
The thing is when you give a tip I need to personally know more about you. His tips throughout the book mean about as much as me asking a tourist whose eating at the Olive Garden after traveling to NYC to eat at the same place they could eat back home for a great Italian restaurant in my lovely city of NYC. Get it? Their opinion would mean diddley squat based on their dining choice (PS the OLIVE GARDEN is not Italian its a souped up version of McDonald's with red looking sauce) . the same goes for Rick's opinion. for all I know this guy is a right winger, Catholic, raised on a remote farm in alaska whose first trip out of the states was to Italy.
August 21, 2016
Me and my wife read the hell out of this book while on our honeymoon in Italy. The self guided tours were extremely helpful, and saved us a bunch of money on stuffy tour groups. We used the survival phrases, reading a train ticket, and food/drink specialty highlights. This was absolutely worth the money 10x over. This book is so worn from only 2 weeks of use, and that's a testament to how much we really relied on it. If you're going to Italy I can't recommend this enough.
December 31, 2023
I think I know much of this book off by heart, I've spent so much time perusing it! So helpful for many destinations, sadly Sicily is missing, but we got ideas for out of the way suggestions, and a surprising discount on our hotel in Rome for being RS readers! Using his podcast talks and walking tours in conjunction with this book can really enhance your travel planning.
June 5, 2023
It was great. Used for my recent trip to Italy. Very informative and helpful.
Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews