This personal, and wonderfully well informed, selection of the most rewarding towns, cities, villages and individual monuments in Italy is the definitive guidebook for the discerning traveller. The author has been visiting Italy, for study, for work and for pleasure, for over fifty years, and is the perfect companion for those who want to know about more than the obvious attractions. As well as comprehensively covering the finest sights in the major tourist centres of Rome, Florence, Venice and elsewhere, Russell discusses and describes the neglected, or little known, masterpieces that are still to be found the length and breadth of the Italian peninsula. In a book that will educate and astonish the expert as surely as it will guide and inform the first-time visitor, the author chooses and explores palaces and gardens, city squares and lonely churches, frescoes and altarpieces, great museums and tiny ruins that together provide a richly textured portrait of a country where the history and patterns of civilization lie more thickly than anywhere else on earth.