Lonely Planet Venice & the Veneto (Travel Guide)

All the existing information in the book helped us with different locations and understanding the basic history of areas where we going nearby as we travelled around the streets.

Good, well informed book. Good for city visit.

Bought for future trip. But as I have some 15-20 Lonely Planet guides, I don't expect it to let me down

Helpful maps

I’ve bought lots of Lonely Planet guides and loved them. This one however is being returned! The writing is simply dreadful- verbose, yet vague on the really useful “insider” style knowledge you want from Lonely Planet guides. Its hyperbolic, overly sentimental way of viewing Venice makes it unhelpful and a really dreary read. I’m glad I ordered a few months before my trip so I can find something that will actually enhance my trip.

I travel often and so frequently buy travel books. I can’t say this one is particularly good. Poorly designed the maps for each district are grouped together at the back of the book rather than with the corresponding section. This is very annoying when you are trying to locate a recommendation,flipping from district section to map to location key. It has put me off purchasing lonely planet guides. The actual content could be more insightful too as it is often vague and inaccurate.

Awesome guide with a lot of valuable information

ヴェネチアガイドとして、付属の地図がとても使いやすかったです。

Very giod guide of Venice, it was very useful for our American friends, I liked very much the tracks proposed

This is Lonely Planet's TENTH edition on Venice, so you would expect it to be rather well-rehearsed. Well I used the FIRST edition (by Damien Simonis) for trips in 2000 and 2001 and thought it was good for its time. But the current edition (which is by different authors) is considerably dumbed down, and also has rather poor production, compared to the first one. Most of all, a tourist book should have INFORMATION about the place, but this book has a lot less information that its forerunner. For example where the first edition identified a lot of the important palaces in the maps of the Grand Canal, this book has empty spaces on the maps: no labels and no numbers! And this is true elsewhere: far fewer attractions are mentioned. The second basic requirement of a tourist book is that it be easy to navigate. Well it's very difficult to find things in this book, mostly because the index is very brief, and they don't call things by their correct names - rather they use common ultra-abbreviations. (They should be explaining these to us, not assuming we already know them!) For example, good luck in finding the two biggest Gothic basilicas in the city: Basilica di Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, and Basilica de San Giovanni e Paolo. You will only find them if you look up "I Frari" and "Zanipolo" respectively! How is any non-Venetian supposed to know those terms? And the architecturally important Palazzo Centani is never even mentioned by name - they just call it the house of Carlo Goldoni, the playwright. That's totally unacceptable: a book like this should be telling us who lived in a certain house, not assuming we already know. Besides, you won't find Goldoni in the index either.