Take in a gondolier's sweet song while gliding past Venetian palaces, sample olives and wines as you traverse Tuscany's storybook hills, or be humbled amid thousands of years of Roman history and art; all with your trusted travel companion. Get to the heart of Italy now! Inside Lonely Planet Italy Travel Guide: Full-colour maps and images throughout Highlights and itineraries help you tailor your trip to your personal needs and interests Insider tips to save time and money and get around like a local, avoiding crowds and trouble spots Essential info at your fingertips - hours of operation, phone numbers, websites, transit tips, prices Honest reviews for all budgets - eating, sleeping, sight-seeing, going out, shopping, hidden gems that most guidebooks miss Cultural insights give you a richer, more rewarding travel experience - including history, art, literature, cinema, music, architecture, politics, cuisine, wine, customs Free, convenient pull-out Rome map (included in print version), plus over 137 colour maps Covers Rome, Turin, Piedmont, the Italian Riviera, Milan, the Lakes, Dolomites, Venice, Emilia-Romagna, Florence, Tuscany, Umbria, Abruzzo, Naples, Campania, Puglia, Sicily, Sardinia and more eBook Features: (Best viewed on tablet devices and smartphones) Downloadable PDF and offline maps prevent roaming and data charges Effortlessly navigate and jump between maps and reviews Add notes to personalise your guidebook experience Seamlessly flip between pages Bookmarks and speedy search capabilities get you to key pages in a flash Embedded links to recommendations' websites Zoom-in maps and images Inbuilt dictionary for quick referencing The Perfect Choice: Lonely Planet Italy , our most comprehensive guide to Italy, is perfect for both exploring top sights and taking roads less travelled. Looking for just the highlights of Italy? Check out Lonely Planet Discover Italy, a photo-rich guide to the country's most popular attractions. Looking for a guide focused on Rome, Florence or Venice? Check out our Lonely Planet Rome guide, Florence & Tuscany guide, and Venice & the Veneto guide for a comprehensive look at what each of these cities has to offer; Lonely Planet Discover Rome, a photo-rich guide to the city's most popular attractions; or Lonely Planet Pocket Rome, a handy-sized guide focused on the can't-miss sights for a quick trip. Authors: Written and researched by Lonely Planet.

    Chef Mario Batali, known to fans far and wide as "Molto Mario" from his appearances on television's Food Network and as chef of New York's much-loved Pó restaurant, has elevated these simple principles to fine art, creating innovative new fare that pays tribute to traditional Italian home cooking in a distinctly modern way. Now, for the first time, more than 200 of his irresistible recipes for fresh pastas, sprightly salads, grilled dishes, savory ragus, and many others are gathered in Simple Italian Food, a celebration of the flavors and spirit of Italy.        Mario draws inspiration for his distinctive dishes from the two "villages" that have left their stamps on his cuisine: Borgo Capanne, the tiny hillside village in Northern Italy where he lived and cooked for several years, and New York's Greenwich Village, where he has ready access to bountiful produce and outstanding artisan-made products; his full-flavored, smartly presented fare combines the best of both worlds. Chapters covering antipasti, pasta and risotto, fish, meat and poultry, contorni (side dishes), and cheese and sweets offer classic dishes such as Baked Lasagne with Asparagus and Pesto and pork loin cooked in caramelized onions and milk alongside Batali's own enticing improvisations--Penne with Spicy Goat Cheese and Hazelnut Pesto or Tuna Carpaccio with Cucumbers, Sweet Potatoes, and Saffron Vinaigrette. And because his recipes succeed on the strength of their ingredients rather than on virtuoso techniques, home cooks can easily duplicate the clear, clean flavors and lively presentations that are Mario's signature. Thirty-two pages of color photographs showcase Chef Batali's colorful and approachable recipes.        Traditionalists as well as those who thrill to the new will want to make dozens of these crowd-pleasing dishes a permanent part of their repertoire and embrace Mario Batali'sphilosophy of Simple Italian Food.

     1497, Renaissance Rome: As the teenage daughter of Pope Alexander VI, Lucrezia Borgia is a young noblewoman immersed in all the glamor of the Vatican Palace. Yet after a brutal killing shocks the city, Lucrezia learns that a dark truth lies beneath the surface of the Papal Court: in their ruthless quest for power, her father and brother are willing to poison their enemies. Her family are murderers. After discovering that her new husband is next to die, Lucrezia struggles to help him escape from Rome before the assassins strike. Against a barrage of political intrigues, papal spies, and diabolical tricks, Lucrezia uses all her wits to defy her family and save her husband from assassination. But as tragedy looms ever closer, and her plans gradually fail, she finds herself confronting an enemy far more sinister than she ever imagined… INCLUDED INSIDE: - An exclusive excerpt of M. G. Scarsbrook's novel THE MARLOWE CONSPIRACY, an historical thriller set in Elizabethan England, featuring Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare teaming-up to expose a high-level government conspiracy!

    Sicily, 1862. In the newly united Italy, Judge Surra arrives in Montelusa to take charge of the local court, in a town where conflict has been kind to a select few. At first, Surra is baffled by the quaint local customs: cryptic anonymous notes, mutterings in the street, tasty - if tasteless - gifts of disembodied animal heads. However, buoyed by his twin passions for justice and fine dining, Surra is determined to settle into island life, no matter who stands in his way. Distilling his customary humour and tension into this miniature masterpiece, Andrea Camilleri casts an ironic eye on the corruption and charm of a turbulent small town, testing his naïve but noble hero against the darkest arts of the Mafia.This story is available in print as a part of the collection Judges, published by MacLehose Press.

    Packed with 50 lists and 500+ entries, it is a multiplex of pointless Bollywood gyaan. Separated in eight logicless sections and with out a contents page (or index), it is a book for dipping into and zipping through. Remember your favourite Bollywood film fast, actionpacked, mad, packed with colourful characters and a little bit of everything? Well, they made this book out of it. About the AuthorDiptakirti Chaudhuri has been a salesman for more than twelve years now having sold soaps, soft drinks, oils and newspapers all over India. His obsessive love for movies is a hereditary disease, which was nurtured during his engineering and MBA college days. When not watching or reading about mov ies, he writes about them on his blog, Calcutta Chro mosome (http://diptakirti.blogspot.com) or discusses them on Twitter (@diptakirti).He has published a book for children on the 2011 cricket World Cup. This is his second book.He lives in Gurgaon with his wife, a son and a daughter. None of them shares his obsessive love for the movies. Yet.

    She inherited her mother's stunning looks - she was known for her slender figure, gray-blue eyes, and blonde hair.When her father became pope, he sought to consolidate his power and arranged a marriage between fourteen-year-old Lucrezia and the first of her three husbands, twenty-eight-year-old Giovanni Sforza. Shortly after the marriage, Alexander, concluded he no longer needed an alliance with the Sforza family. He ordered Giovanni's assassination, but when the young bridegroom escaped, ended Lucrezia's marriage by ordering an annulment.Following the lengthy annulment process - during which Lucrezia was accused of having an affair and a child with Alexander's chamberlain Pedro Calderon, whose body was later found floating in Rome's Tiber River, “where he fell against his will” - Lucrezia was married to Alfonso of Aragon in 1498. Alexander appointed a pregnant Lucrezia governor of the Umbrian town of Spoleto in 1499. Alfonso, wary of shifting political alliances, fled Rome for a brief time, but returned in 1500, where he was murdered. Alfonso left Lucrezia with a son, Rodrigo.After Alfonso's conveniently timed murder, Alexander arranged a third marriage for Lucrezia, to Alfonso I d'Este, a powerful duke. The two had several children, and Lucrezia came into her own as a Renaissance woman, overcoming her scandalous reputation - despite several affairs - and maintaining her position and power as the Borgia family's influence and fortunes fell following Alexander's death.Lucrezia Borgia was a woman of and ahead of her time. Here is her little-told story.

    Then and Now enters the world of Machiavelli, and covers three important months in the career of that crafty politician, worldly seducer and high priest of schemers.

    Book by Esposito, Sergio

    “Searching observations and astonishing comprehension of the Venetian taste and character” (New York Herald Tribune).

    So was the priceless cultural heritage of thousands of years.In the midst of the conflict, the Allied Forces appointed the monuments officers—a motley group of art historians, curators, architects, and artists—to ensure that the great masterworks of European art and architecture were not looted or bombed into oblivion. The journalist Ilaria Dagnini Brey focuses her spellbinding account on the monuments officers of Italy, quickly dubbed “the Venus Fixers” by bemused troops.Working on the front lines in conditions of great deprivation and danger, these unlikely soldiers stripped the great galleries of their incomparable holdings and sent them into safety by any means they could; when trucks could not be requisitioned or “borrowed,” a Tiepolo altarpiece might make its midnight journey across the countryside balanced in the front basket of a bicycle. They blocked a Nazi convoy of two hundred stolen paintings—including Danae, Titian’s voluptuous masterpiece, an intended birthday present for Hermann Göring.They worked with skeptical army strategists to make sure air raids didn’t take out the heart of an ancient city, and patched up Renaissance palazzi and ancient churches whose lead roofs were sometimes melted away by the savagery of the attacks, exposing their frescoed interiors to the harsh Tuscan winters and blistering summers. Sometimes they failed. But to an astonishing degree, they succeeded, and anyone who marvels at Italy’s artistic riches today is witnessing their handiwork.In the course of her research, Brey gained unprecedented access to private archives and primary sources, and the result is a book at once thorough and grandly entertaining—a revelatory take on a little-known chapter of World War II history. The Venus Fixers is an adventure story with the gorgeous tints of a Botticelli landscape as its backdrop.

    Round as in stout, chubby, and hungry, always and endlessly hungry. He grew up in a big, loud Italian family in White Plains, New York, where meals were epic, outsize affairs. At those meals, he demonstrated one of his foremost qualifications for his future career: an epic, outsize appetite for food. But his relationship with eating was tricky, and his difficulties with managing it began early.When he was named the restaurant critic for the New York Times in 2004, he knew enough to be nervous. He would be performing one of the most closely watched tasks in the epicurean universe; a bumpy ride was inevitable, especially for someone whose writing beforehand had focused on politics, presidential campaigns, and the Pope.But as he tackled his new role as one of the most loved and hated tastemakers in the New York restaurant world, he also had to make sense of a decades-long love-hate affair with food, which had been his enemy as well as his friend. Now he’d have to face down this enemy at meal after indulgent meal. His Italian grandmother had often said, "Born round, you don’t die square." Would he fall back into his worst old habits? Or had he established a truce with the food on his plate?In tracing the highly unusual path Bruni traveled to become a restaurant critic, Born Round tells the captivating story of an unpredictable journalistic odyssey and provides an unflinching account of one person’s tumultuous, often painful lifelong struggle with his weight. How does a committed eater embrace food without being undone by it? Born Round will speak to every hungry hedonist who has ever had to rein in an appetite to avoid letting out a waistband, and it will delight anyone interested in matters of family, matters of the heart, and the big role food plays in both.

    Until they received some advice from a complete stranger in a pub.Their response was to sell everything in order to move to Venice, in search of a better, simpler life. They were wrong about the 'simpler' bit...To Venice with Love recounts how they arrived in Venice with ten pieces of luggage, no job, no friends and no long-term place to stay. From struggling with the language to battling bureaucracy; the terror of teaching English to Italian teenagers, the company of a modestly friendly cat... and finally, from debugging financial systems on an Edinburgh industrial estate, to building an ordinary life in an extraordinary city, To Venice with Love is a love-letter to a city that changed their lives. It's a story told through the history, music, art, architecture (and, of course, the food) of La Serenissima.

    Vogler is to collect a famous Classical Roman marble statue, The Discus Thrower, and get it to the German border, where it will be turned over to Gestapo custody. It is a simple, three-day job.Things start to go wrong almost immediately. The Italian twin brothers who have been hired to escort Vogler to the border seem to have priorities besides the task at hand—wild romances, perhaps even criminal jobs on the side—and Vogler quickly loses control of the assignment. The twins set off on a dangerous detour and Vogler realizes he will be lucky to escape this venture with his life, let alone his job. With nothing left to lose, the young German gives himself up to the Italian adventure, to the surprising love and inevitable losses along the way. The Detour is a bittersweet novel about artistic obsession, misplaced idealism, detours, and second chances, set along the beautiful back-roads of northern Italy on the eve of war.

    Her acceptance into this close-knit community was a hard-won thing and has inspired Isabella to capture the true spirit of Montalcino. Vanilla Beans & Brodo tells of the violent history of this medieval village, which has lefts its mark on the character traits of the Montalcinese, and also offers a rare insight into the anxiety, joy, fun, and pressure of daily life as it unfolds with the seasons. An evocative story of the rivalry between village neighborhoods, of football fever and festival pageantry, Isabella Dusi destroys the myth that Tuscan villages are tranquil places, and instead reveals a life infinitely rich and full of dramas.

    Here is delicious food for less.So much more than cheap dinner ideas - here are meals that cost under a pound but look and taste a million dollars! Recipes for the whole family without breaking the bank.Instagram chef sensation Miguel Barclay is taking the world by storm with his delicious meals that cost less than £1 per person.'I've always loved cooking but I'm not a fan of needlessly over-complicated recipes that waste time and money.So I've created my own style of cooking: simple ingredients, straightforward recipes and mouthwatering meals, all on a budget.Now you can eat the food you love - from meatball marinara to chicken katsu curry, lamb moussaka to aubergine dal - all for under £1 per person.'Miguel's easy-to-follow, ready-in-minutes recipes are for a single serving, and can all be cooked for under £1 per person - just multiply them up for more servings. 'As you would expect from such a relaxed style of cooking, the book is laid out in a similarly laidback manner. There are no chapters or themes. Just flick through the pages and cook whichever dish you fancy. But, as a nod to my Instagram roots and to help you identify types of dish, I have labelled each recipe with hashtags, so if you want to find veggie food, just look out for the veggie hashtags.One Pound Meals are designed to use a core group of ingredients, and this is the key to eliminating waste. Just start with one recipe, and depending on what you have left over, choose your next recipe accordingly. I want you to bounce around the book on a sort of never-ending random journey as you use up those leftover ingredients. It also means you can plan a week's worth of meals in one go and shop more efficiently.'With savvy supermarket shopping swaps and time-saving tips, One Pound Meals makes cooking quicker, easier and tastier, and with less waste.One Pound Meals includes:* Lasagne * Crab mac & cheese * Chicken katsu curry * Pork chop in a mustard & leek sauce * Spaghetti carbonara * Mushroom risotto * Quiche lorraine * Aubergine dal & chapati * Scotch Egg * Ultimate £1 burger * Ham & mushroom pizza * Pancake stack