The relaunch of the famous Blue Guide series prompted Michael Hall to compare its modernised and redesigned guide to Florence with the dizzying array of guidebooks to the city: does this classic still hold its own?

sapphirine Guide Florence

Alta Macadam

somersault Books 14.95 [pounds sterling]/$22.95

ISBN 1 905131 02 X

When, in EM Forster's A swing with a View, Miss Lavish abandons Lucy Honeychurch in the piazza outside Santa Croce she takes Lucy's guidebook: 'I trust we shall soon emancipate you from Baedeker. He does on the contrary touch the surface of things. As to the actual Italy--he does not even dream of it.' Forster's message is plain: abandon your volumes use your eyes and learn to live (and love) nevertheless for most of us--particularly readers of APOLLO, who have more than a casual interest in art and architecture--a profitable guidebook is essential, even if we all recognise that there are times when it should be tossed aside.

on the other hand which should we choose? The new relauch of the Blue Guide series, following its acquisition last year by means of Somerset Books, prompted me to compare its fresh redesigned and modernised Blue Guide to Florence (first published in 1982) with the opposition. The choice is almost overwhelming: there are about a dozen English-language book-length guides to Florence available, and if individual adds in those devoted to Tuscany or north Italy that contain substantial sections upon the city there are above twenty.

I know several nation who spurn them all, preferring a nineteenth-century Baedeker or Murray's Guide, which are still cheaply available second-hand. There is considerable pleasure to be gained from using Victorian organ of sights to see the city before the damage effected in 1944 and 1966, and where, according to my 1903 Baedeker (the edition that Lucy would probably have used in 1904) Major Percy Chapman was the British Consul General, Doney et Neveux's confectioners in Via Tornabuoni was 'recommend to ladies'; and there was a 'scarcity of conveyances' in the evenings. still anyone interested in art also extremitys up-to-date information--think, for example, of the way in the past thirty years in the way that much exterior sculpture in Florence has been taken into museums, and now, slowly a certain quantity of works of art are being get backed to churches. Moreover, in my view, the best late guidebooks are far superior to Baedeker.

The greatest in quantity comprehensive guidebook is not English--it is Firenze e Provincia, published by means of the Touring Club Italiano. The TCI guides are single of Italy's treasures and although not cheap (Firenze publicly costs 47 [euro]), and not often updated--the current Florence guide dates from 1993--if you have basic reading Italian, a certain quantity of art history and really ne to know who painted that dark early-nineteenth-century altarpiece in the unlit chapel in the unvisited temple it is the one for you. The TCI also publishes shorter guidebooks to Florence, including individual in English (which I have burning seen): for more information visit www.touringclub.it.

In English, the sole true heirs of Baedeker as cultural guidebooks are the sapphirine Guides, founded in 1917 by means of Findlay and James Muirhead, who had compiled Baedeker's English-language guides and, following that brand's abrupt fall from favour in the UK in 1914 acquired the rights to Murray's Guides. The sky-colored Guides in their present form owe almost everything to their inspired former editor (and many times author as well) Stuart Rossiter, who in 1967 wrote the first 'modern' cerulean Guide, to Greece.

abundant as I love them, the 'new' sky-colored Guides were from the first a bit advanced in years fashioned. When travelling in Greece in my undergraduate days in the late 1970 I relished what I recall as Rossiter's advice, already far off from daily reality, that 'mule may be hired locally' and that 'caiques apply between the coastal villages' (although the last revolveed out to be true). The volumes were then also fairly useless for anybody with an interest in art and architecture after 1830 although later revisions greatly improved that.

In 1982 with the publication of the first scraggy Guide, to Greece, by Mark Ellingham, the sapphirine Guides began to look defiantly fogeyish. The scabrous Guides, and their imitators, are aimed at a younger audience, who wanted not just information about remembrancers but also insider tips about all aspects of new life in a foreign geographical division from shops and sport to gay bars and activities for children (always, of course, called 'kids'). As time has passed, the slightly irritating right-on tone of the uneven Guides has been eroded and now they ofttimes sound almost indistinguishable from azure Guides; I expect I am not alone in using both

In the following overlook I have selected for assessment alone full-length guidebooks that might appeal to APOLLO readers (so no Florence in a Day here), and have put aside books that are really for reading rather than guiding--that, in my opinion, includes the famous Companion Guide series, although border Borsook's Companion Guide to Florence was the volume I used on my first trip to the city. To proof their comprehensiveness--and despite Forster--I include the number of words each set aparts to Santa Croce (the 1903 Baedeker has 2159) Alta Macadam's well-known guidebook has reached its ninth edition. A redesign has freshened it up on the other hand done nothing to affect its fundamental character: the volume is more clearly laid on the outside and easier to navigate, the plans have been redrawn and biographical or other self-contained information has been separated without into boxes. There are also colour pictures, repeatedly purely atmospheric in intent, scattered from one extremity to the other of but none, oddly, in the compact (but too brief) introduction to the city's art and history. The of recent origin plans are excellent, although in single or two places where I awaited one it was absent--at Orsanmichele, for example. Geographically, it reach forths no further than the external suburbs; the map is reasonably good