Italy by Car, a New Travel Guide

This post is about a new travel guide about touring Italy by car.  Many people who visit Italy will come by car, and to really discover all that Italy’s exceptionally beautiful and varied landscapes have to offer, a car is just about essential.

Beautiful Italy

The Touring Club of Italy, better known as the Touring Club Italiano here in Italy, is a Milan-based non-profit organisation which was founded way back in 1894 by a group of 55 Italian cycling enthusiasts.  The TCI, as it is often known, publishes lots of interesting Italy travel guides, the most famous of which are the ‘Guide Rosse‘ or Red Guides, which are not related to Michelin’s similarly named series of Red Guides, by the way.  TCI guides are also available in English.

Well, the other day I found myself with half an hour to kill, so I popped in to an Italian Touring Club travel store in central Milan.  The shelves of this shop are jam packed with guides, videos, DVDs and a whole host of other travel related resources.  You can even buy Italian Touring Club bicycles, which is in keeping with the origins of this organisation, which now boasts some 400,000 members, incidentally.  Some of the Italian members of the TCI may well be cyclists, but the majority nowadays will not be, one suspects.

All this travel related goodness is not solely limited to Italy – Italians are quite adventurous world travellers in their own right – and guides to every corner of the world can be found.  Buried in amongst all this travel literature you may also find guides in English, as indeed, did I.

However, the guide which caught my eye was a new one all about discovering Italy by car. I stumped up the 20 Euro asking price, and thought I’d write a little about it, and then tell you the rub.

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Guess Where in Italy? Part 1 – The Answer

Ok, so nobody even tried to hazard a guess as to the name of the lovely bay shown in the first Guess Where in Italy post.

Never mind, it was probably too difficult!

Read on for the answer, and for a map showing just where this bay can be found, just in case this post gives you an idea for a holiday location…

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Hostels in Italy

Like much of Western Europe, accommodation in Italy can be on the expensive side.  But right across the country, from fashionable Milan in the north to the Sicilian capital of Palermo, there is a range of hostels and low cost hotels in Italy offering cheap dorm beds and private rooms.

Accommodation on a Budget

Hostels aren’t all about drunken students and bunk beds any more, either – modern facilities and more luxurious features are increasingly common. HostelBookers has a wide variety of accommodation to suit travelers heading to Italy on a budget.

What follows are a few examples of hostels and low cost hotels from around Italy which really show the quality of such so-called ‘budget’ accommodation. … Continue Reading

A Weekend in Bardonecchia

Just before the Christmas holidays we took our little one for a weekend on the snow up in the Italian ski resort of Bardonecchia which is right on the border with France in the north western corner of Italy.

As is my wont, I took the odd photo or three, so here are a few.  Others can be found over at Flickr.  I’ll also tell you what I made of this place, just in case you might be thinking of looking for somewhere to go skiing this winter, and Bardonecchia is a good place to go skiing with children.
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Bardonecchia

We’re off the Italian alpine resort of Bardonecchia shortly!  I’m looking forward to this weekend in the mountains, and after seeing this brief You Tube video presentation of the area, I’m even more keen on being there!

I know it is a little dated, but it’s the video used to send up the place before the 2006 Turin winter Olympics.  It’s only 30 seconds or so long.  Have a look and see what you think: … Continue Reading

Roccaraso Ski Video

Off the skied piste resort Roccaraso is somewhere I’ve already written about, so I thought you might like to see the Roccaraso ski slopes in all their snowy glory, seeing as it is the time of the year when people are thinking about booking ski holidays.

Hope you like the video! … Continue Reading