Product Description

A gastronomic guide to Italy from country markets and wineries to city restaurants and cooking schools, and lessons on cheese making, wine, olive oil and balsamic vinegar. The guide covers over 504 places with a classic town selected from each region that best embodies the region's cuisine, information on over 800 eating places and over 40 recipes.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #981192 in Books
• Published on: 2003-04-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 736 pages

Review
There is far more to Italy than pizza, pasta and Bolognese sauce. It is a country profoundly influenced by its neighbours, its history and its people with every region having their own specialities and wines. Fred Plotkin, aka "Garibaldi with a fork", having followed in his footsteps all over this evocative country, shares his memories of over 25 years residence, describing with salivatory delight the tastes, aromas and ambience of Italian eating. His dedication to the gastronomic gems to be found here are obvious - anyone who can fill the better part of twenty pages describing a single meal obviously spends his life according to his stomach! Region by region, Plotkin gives a highly personalised tour of the bars, restaurants, shops and markets, interspersed with places to see and be seen. Much more than a gastronomic guide, this is a journal of memories of a country Plotkin obviously adores - its people, geography, climate as well as food-making. It is as much a bedtime read as a food and travel guide and all visitors to Italy, looking to enjoy and share in its culture, will find this indispensable. - Lucy Watson

Decanter Magazine, Dec 2002
It's selective, rigorous, informed by honest sensuousness and readable besides

Derek Cooper, Saga Magazine
The best guide I've ever seen the wine and food of Italy.

Customer Reviews

Outstanding (but 2nd edition is near identical to the first)
For anyone travelling in Italy with an interest in food and drink, this is an invaluable book. It's laid out as a guide book, indexed by region and town with a list of recommended restaurants, shops, etc. for each. But it's so much more, with the introductory chapters and an overview for each region showing Plotkin's deep and comprehensive understanding of his subject. It's the most insightful guide to Italian cuisine I've come across, and our first edition copy is falling apart after five years of regular use.

Sadly, however, the second edition is more or less the same as the first - the "updating" is simply the deletion of a handful of entries that have ceased trading, replaced with others carefully written to fit into the same space in the book so that it didn't have to be re-typeset. There's really hardly anything new at all. Even regular travellers are unlikely to find it worthwhile buying another copy for so few updated entries.

A must for food interested travellers to Italy
A really useful guidebook with true gems not found in other books. Have used it in Tuscany, Rome, Naples and the Amalfi coast. Have never let me down and I have numerous times lent it to friends for their trips. A heavy burden to carry with you but I would not go to Italy without it.

Readable and reliable
This book is just simply that: readable and reliable. It's a good read with all sorts of quirky facts thrown in, but the restaurant guide is simply the business. We suspected as much from reviews and recommendations by "Fred" (as we've come to call him) of restaurants we knew from previous stays in Italy, but we used this guide for a recent short break in Umbria and it was right on the money for lunch and dinner, good food, and good restaurants. It's worth its weight in gold (and that's a lot of gold!).