Blue Guide Sicily: Ninth Edition (Travel Series)

If you already know where you want to go on Sicily or are in the midst of a trip, this book will supply vast insights to any site and almost any town you pass through. However, for trip planning it is overwhelming in its detail. There is little discernment between great sites and everything else. There is little help in determining how to spend one’s time (i.e., how many nights in each location), nor how best to travel between sites. For example, there is a train from Palermo to Trapani but it can take 4 hours where as the bus is about two and a car only an hour! I like a guidebook to help with those decisions. There are few, if any, local guide or tour recommendations. Take the Blue Guide along but turn elsewhere for planning.

The Blue Guide tradition of giving full information is capably upheld in the volume about Sicly. This is perfect when you need to know all about an archeological site. I bought this book for a short trip to the island and I found it perfect for learning all the details I crave. I recommend the e- book edition on a Kindle or tablet to avoid lugging around a weighty tome.

I used an old edition of this years ago. Nice to have an updated copy! The book is very informative with lots of valuable history of the country and concise info on where and what to see.

This is not a book about beaches, hotels, and restaurants. It is the best guide about history and archaeology. Worth the price if you are there to see and learn rather than tan like a pig skin.

The Blue Guide is the best information available, with a lot more info on history, art and architecture than any other guide.The reason for the three stars is that this version offers neither a table of contents nor an index.

In depth explanation of art, architecture and history. Not afraid to be sophisticated. Well above the level of more popular guide books.

I always find the ‘Blue Guides’ excellent. Very informative and easy to use.

Great detail about all locations in Sicily, even the small towns and villages between primary tourist sites.

I am still reading this book that gives the detail of the archaeological sites and the links with ancient Greece. It is well written and well ordered. Of all the books I have read on Sicily, this one is the one I will take with me when I visit the island.

I bought this guide the night before leaving for a one week's holiday in Palermo. Only after I had downloaded it did I see that its only review gave it one star, and I almost certainly would not have bought it had I read the review. In contrast to the reviewer, I found it extremely easy to use, with very good linkages between the Table of Contents at the back and the discussion in the text, and also cross-referencing between different parts of the text. I normally download my Kindle books on to two devices. The first is the Kindle paperwhite tablet, which has the great advantage that it can be read in broad sunlight. This is especially useful for travel guides. They are also very easy to slip into a pocket. The drawback is that, as your reviewer noted, diagrams and photographs tend to be too small and cannot be enlarged. I also download them on to an Android tablet (I use a Google Nexus 7 inch tablet, but this has probably been rendered obsolete by now.) With the Android version one can enlarge diagrams and photos very easily, and view them in a landscape version if preferred.As for the guide itself, it is well-written and so far as I could see, very comprehensive. There were one or two glitches about opening times--swings and roundabouts, we found some things unexpectedly open as well as others unexpectedly closed. But for the most part it proved accurate and very helpful,

Detailed guidance on sites - very useful to supplement standard holiday trip guides

Excellent and detailed

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