Blue Guide Rome, Eighth Edition

This book divides Rome into 29 walking tours. Each one takes about a day. Maybe you could do two per day in the summer. A few of the tours have a common theme, but most of them just cover a region of the city. The focus is on cultural/historical sites. There's very little about where to eat, sleep, or shop. The author is thorough and provides a lot of insight. The book reads as a folksy continuous narrative by a knowledgeable and perceptive guide. If you have a month in Rome, you could use this book to get a great tour.

Many tourists would find this book difficult to use. Suppose you're in Rome for a few days, not nearly enough time to walk all 29 tours. There is no easy way to use this book to prioritize which sites to visit.

The Michelin Green Guide has a similar aim and focus, but is much more user-friendly for a short visit. It breaks the city into a smaller number of regional walks. In general it's not quite as thorough as the Blue Guide in terms of what it says...Read more

Let's be clear. This "guide" book is usually standard textbook fare for the 35 American students chosen to study at the Intercollegiate Center for Classical Studies (ICCS) in Rome. Why? Between two covers and kept in your sachel, it offers everything a student would need to know about the Roman ruins that might have been the Temple to Spes or the iconography of a Caravaggio hanging in ... wait, a minute, what church are we in? The Blue Guide series is for those who are looking for a little education amongst their travels. As such, it usually needs supplementing with a more popular, flashy compendium of phone numbers or restaurants. At least now we're clear (but don't begrudge it).

If you are looking for a guide to do EVERYTHING, you can probably do better. Certainly, if you only want to bring one book, this probably isn't it. However, I wouldn't dare go to Rome without it. Rome is an amazing city, where the smallest church may seem like nothing from the outside. But go in, open your Blue Guide and suddenly you realize that there's a Caravaggio or a Bernini on the premises. I don't use a guide such as this for planning. I use it for reference while I'm in the city. I'd have missed PLENTY without it. For the purpose it serves for me, it's the best there is!