The legendary she-wolf who suckled Romulus and Remus, the powerful Vestal Virgins, the Empress Livia and the crowned Madonna haunt the ruins, palaces, museums and churches of Rome, offering special perspectives for the woman traveller. For the independent woman traveller, intent on getting the most out of the city, day and night, and on varied budgets, this guide is a useful companion, with listings of galleries, shops and smart cafes. There is also information on hotels and restaurants and avoiding potential harassment. The information is from a woman's point of view: history, art, contemporary society and culture; advice and recommendations on hotels and restaurants, public transport and a special section for children.

Virago Woman's Travel Guide to Rome

Travel

Belford, Ros

Europe

Ulysses Pr

**ITALY** (EYEWITNESS TRAV)

Dorling Kindersley Plc P/B

These acclaimed travel guides feature a dramatic full-color section at the front, design elements to make them easier to use, up-to-date information on restaurants and accommodations, meticulously detailed maps, transportation tips and discussions on geography, natural wonders, landmarks, itineraries, cultural facts and other valuable tips for travelers.

The Rough Guide to Italy (Rough Guides)

Dunford, Martin

JEPSON, TIM

Woolfrey, Celia

Rough Guides

The Rough Guide to Italy is the ultimate travel guide with clear maps and detailed coverage of all the best Italian attractions. Discover the vibrant Italian regions with the off-the-beaten track information every visitor to Italy needs. Find up-to-date descriptions of the best hotels in Italy, bars in Italy, restaurants in Italy and shops in Italy to cater for all budgets. Whether you wish to visit the Colosseum in Rome, the thermal spas of Tuscany, the stunning architecture in the heart of Milan or the magnificent canals of Venice; this Rough Guide will ensure you make the most of every moment in Italy. Featuring a comprehensive guide to Italy’s gastronomic delights; enjoy the best authentic Italian food with regional food guides on each chapter and a section devoted to Italian wines. Packed with detailed, updated maps, you’ll find expert tips to help you make the most of Italy’s varied landscape, fantastic hikes and city walks in Italy combined with an authoritative background on Italy’s rich cultural history, highlighting Italy’s spectacular festival culture. 
Make the most of your holiday with The Rough Guide to Italy.

The Rough Guide to Italy 9 (Rough Guide Travel Guides)

Brown, Jules

Andrews, Robert

Buckley, Jonathan

Rome: The Virago Women's Travel Guide

Time Warner Books Uk

This handy guide arms travellers with everything they need to know about going to Italy, from descriptions of specific sites to an overview of the local cultures. Original.

Italy: The Rough Guide, Second Edition

Ellingham, Mark

Buck, Jonathan

INTRODUCTION 
Of all European countries, Italy is perhaps the hardest to classify. It is a modern, industrialized nation, with companies like Fiat and Olivetti market- leaders in their field. It is the harbinger of style, its designers leading the way with each season's fashions. But it is also, to an equal degree, a Mediterranean country, with all that that implies. Agricultural land covers much of the country, a lot of it, especially in the South, still owned under almost feudal conditions. In towns and villages all over the country, life grinds to a halt in the middle of the day for a siesta, and is strongly family-oriented, with an emphasis on the traditions and rituals of the Catholic Church which, notwithstanding a growing scepticism among the country's youth, still dominates people's lives here to an immediately obvious degree. 
Above all Italy provokes reaction. Its people are volatile, rarely indifferent to anything, and on one and the same day you might encounter the kind of disdain dished out to tourist masses worldwide, and an hour later be treated to embarrassingly generous hospitality. If there is a single national characteristic, it's to embrace life to the full: in the hundreds of local festivals taking place across the country on any given day, to celebrate a saint or the local harvest; in the importance placed on good food; in the obsession with clothes and image; and above all in the daily domestic ritual of the collective evening stroll or passeggiata - a sociable affair celebrated by young and old alike in every town and village across the country. 
Italy only became a unified state in 1861 and, as a result, Italians often feel more loyalty to their region than the nation as a whole - something manifest in different cuisines, dialects, landscape, and often varying standards of living. There is also, of course, the country's enormous cultural legacy: Tuscany alone has more classified historical monuments than any country in the world; there are considerable remnants of the Roman Empire all over the country, notably of course in Rome itself; and every region retains its own relics of an artistic tradition generally acknowledged to be among the world's richest. 
Yet there's no reason to be intimidated by the art and architecture. If you want to lie on a beach, there are any number of places to do it: unlike, say, Spain, development has been kept relatively under control, and many resorts are still largely the preserve of Italian tourists. Other parts of the coast, especially in the south of the country, are almost entirely undiscovered. Beaches are for the most part sandy, and doubts about the cleanliness of the water have been confined to the northern part of the Adriatic coast and the Riviera. Mountains, too, run the country's length - from the Alps and Dolomites in the north right along the Apennines, which form the spine of the peninsula - and are an important reference-point for most Italians. Skiing and other winter sports are practised avidly, and in the five national parks, protected from the national passion for hunting, wildlife of all sorts thrives. 
Italy's regional differences: the North and the South Italy breaks down into twenty regions, which in turn divide into different provinces. Some of these regional boundaries reflect long-standing historic borders, like Tuscany, Lombardy or the Veneto; others, like Friuli-Venezia Giulia or Molise, are more recent administrative divisions, often established in recognition of quite modern distinctions. But the sharpest division is between North and South. The North is one of the most advanced industrial societies in the world, a region that despite recent hiccups is one of extraordinary economic dynamism. Its people speak Italian with the cadences of France or Germany and its "capital", Milan, is a thoroughly European city. The South, derogatively known as il mezzogiorno, begins somewhere between Rome and Naples, and is by contrast one of the economically most depressed areas in Europe; and its history of absolutist regimes often seems to linger in the form of the spectre of organized crime and the remote hand of central government in Rome. 
The economic backwardness of the South is partly the result of the historical neglect to which it was subjected by various foreign occupiers. But it is also the result of the deliberate policy of politicians and corporate heads to industrialize the North while preserving the underdeveloped South as a convenient reservoir of labour. Italy's industrial power and dynamism, based in the North, has been built on the back of exploited southerners who emigrated to the northern industrial cities of Turin, Milan and Genoa in their millions during the Fifties and Sixties. Even now, Milan and Turin have very sizeable populations of meridionali - southerners - working in every sector of the economy. 
This north-south divide is something you'll come up against time and again, wherever you're travelling. To a northerner the mere mention of Naples - a kind of totem for the South - can provoke a hostile response; and you may notice graffiti in northern cities against terroni (literally "those of the land"), the derogatory northern nickname for southerners. In recent years this hostility has been articulated through the rise of the Lega Nord, who have campaigned against southern immigration to the North and promoted the future independence of northern Italy from the South. 
Oddly enough, the Lega Nord's campaign against the entrenchment and vested interests of the Italian political establishment, not to mention organized crime and the Mafia (whose power has over recent years spread to the north of the country), has to some extent backfired, in that the north-south rift has become partly diffused by the tangentopoli ("bribesville") corruption scandals - especially given that the centre of the whole affair was, after all, Milan itself. Most northern Italians have been forced to revise their simplistic view of the South as a drain on the country's resources, and look to sort out the problems in their own political backyard; and in turn cities like Naples, previously a focus of Camorra corruption, have begun to clean up their act, too. The massive political upheavals of the late Eighties and early Nineties seem to have given most Italians a greater sense of unity than ever before, if only by virtue of their opposition to the old political establishment. Whether this collective outrage will carry through into anything more permanent, however, is anybody's guess.

The Rough Guide to Italy, 4th edition

Explores Italian culture, history, architecture, art, music, politics, and customs while rating and reviewing accommodations, restaurants, attractions, shopping, and entertainment.

The Rough Guide to Italy

From the CADOGAN GUIDES series, a gourmet tour of Tuscany based around twenty day trips in the region whose focus is a stop at a restaurant or trattoria. Includes practical information, ranging from travel tips and maps to truffle prices and local recipes.

Lazy Days Out in Tuscany (Cadogan Guides)

Facaros, Dana

Pauls, Michael

UNKNO

An uplifting, humorous memoir of a mother building a new life on a beautiful Sicilian island. Reeling from a broken relationship, Ros Belford decides the best chance she has of healing, while giving her daughters a childhood to remember, is to move to Italy and live by the sea. After a false start in a town where machismo is ingrained, they find the small, lush, delightful island of Salina. Izzy and Juno grow up playing on the beach, learning to swim over volcanic bubbles, hearing tales of Aeolian witches and watching Stromboli erupt on the horizon. It is not entirely paradise, however. The school is atrocious, there are power cuts and an earthquake, and property speculators threaten the island's fragile beauty. But an eclectic community of islanders take them to their hearts, friendships are forged and Salina becomes home. Full of humanity, vitality, honesty and optimism, Children of the Volcano is for anyone unwilling to give up dreams of adventure and excitement simply because of parenthood, lack of money and not getting things right the first time.

Children of the Volcano: Finding Freedom and Making a Home for Three in Sicily

Biographies & Memoirs

Community & Culture

September Publishing (UK)

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Books by Belford, Ros