"Books, maps, and audio tours" Top 5 Page for this destination Rome Packing List Tip by brendareed

Miscellaneous: You are ready to head to Rome – you’ve confirmed the hotel, got the e-tickets for the flight, and ensured the dog is in the kennel. But wait! Have you forgotten something? Other than the obvious logistical details of the trip, it is worth spending time reading up on this city and the amazing things you will see BEFORE you ever leave home. If you try to do it all while in Rome (besides fighting your jet lag) – you will miss a good bit. Spend a month or more reading about the history of the city, the types of architecture you will see, and the various artists and art within the city. You will appreciate what you are seeing so much more and maybe will be able to impress your family and friends with your new-found expertise!

While you can get a free map at your hotel, take some time to look over the maps online – you can easily create your own Google map with your trip highlights on it. I did this and it allowed me to realistically plan each day out so I wasn’t cramming too much in only to be disappointed. You can get directions from one place to another – while I didn’t use these directions once in Rome, the initial prep stage allowed me to see how far it would take to walk from one place to another. And I was surprised at how close most things were to each other!

Beside looking through the Virtual Tourist pages on Rome, invest in a good guide book or two. For general planning, we like the Eyewitness books with their colorful pictures. But for in-depth tours and details about the architecture and the art, the must-have guide is The Blue Guide – Rome, which cannot be beat for its information. It contains floorplans for most of the churches as well as tours of the Vatican Museums. We carried this book with us for the entire trip and it paid for itself so many times, especially since many places do not have detailed signage, if any – the Vatican Museum being one of the prime spots with little or no signs.

Audio tours are in many of the top tourist attractions and you can easily spend €5 or more per guide. We found the Rick Steves’ audio tours (and tour maps) on iTunes for FREE. Most of these tours are 30-45 minutes long and give you very good details on where to walk, look, etc. You can start and stop as you wish and the entire family can download them to their own iPods so you don’t have to share earphones to save money (something I saw many people doing with the audio guides rented at the sites). I enjoyed this because it allowed Hubby and I to tour at our own pace. The audio tours are informative and provide just enough historical background for the average non-historian to absorb while providing some fun-facts and humor along the way.

As a history major with an interest in art history, I had done a good bit of study before our trip. One book that I highly recommend (Hubby read it before the trip and got much more out of his visit) is Ross King’s The Pope’s Ceiling, which is the story of how Michelangelo painted the ceiling along with the politics of the time. It is an easy read but has enough technical details that you will come away educated and understanding that ceiling so much better than if you just stand under it and look up unaware of what you are really looking at.

So get your tickets and hotel reservations lined up, then take some time to research this wonderful city before you get here – you’ll be thankful that you took the time to do it and will enjoy it so much more.