I spent part of March and most of April on the road, in Tuscany, researching an update to a major guidebook (about which more soon), but while I was away one or two things have appeared on- and offline.

Most satisfying of the lot was the publication of the new edition of our award-winning family travel guidebook (with a slightly revised name), Frommer’s Tuscany, Umbria & Florence With Your Family. I’m always happy to hear opinions on what’s right, or what’s wrong, about the book, so if you’ve read it or (better still) test-driven it in the wild, do leave a comment below or get in touch. If you’re a journalist or blogger and fancy reviewing it, drop me a line and I’ll arrange that. It’s not yet published in the US, so you can get a jump on the rest if you fancy seeing it now.

Three features appeared online in the last month. The first was a contribution to the Guardian’s 10 of the Best Summer Holidays for Under-Fives, in which I went with the island of Elba (out of season), and these friendly family apartments in particular. As part of my regular tech-expert Q&A slot for the Sunday Telegraph, I answered the reader question: Where can I search online for affordable alternative accommodation? Among my suggestions for sidestepping the usual villa, apartment, and hotel websites were the excellent “pop-up B&B” site Crashpadder.com and MonasteryStays.com, which sells what you think it sells, currently in Italy only (but watch this space). MonasteryStays.com recently hosted me with the Suore di Santa Elisabetta, in Florence, a friendly place I’d certainly recommend to anyone travelling on a budget and bringing a car into the city.

Most recently, I wrote an extended slideshow piece for Frommers.com on San Frediano, Florence’s rapidly-changing left-bank neighbourhood:

Cities change. It’s what they do. However, one of the draws of Florence has been that its center is stuck in time. It was old when Lucy and George traded gazes in E. M. Forster’s 1908 novel, Room with a View. It was old when the English Grand Tourists of the 1700s came to study the palazzo architecture and church art. Heck, some of it was even old when Michelangelo raised his giantDavid outside the Palazzo Vecchio. He’d still be able to navigate much of Florence’s centro storico, without Google Maps.

However, one part that is changing — and fast — is San Frediano.

There’s more in the pipeline, including three more guidebooks due out before the end of 2011 and hopefully an update to my Florence iPhone app (iTunes link). My Amazon Author Page has details of a couple of the books.

A handful of bits and pieces relating to Italy have appeared while I’ve been on my recent Italian research trip…

8 Italian masterpieces that barely survived

War after war, occupation followed by revolution, bad luck combined with bad judgment — all have contributed to the destruction of Italy’s art treasures. A fire in the Sala del Scrutinio and the Sala del Maggior Consiglio in Venice’s Doge’s Palace destroyed several Titians as well as work by Bellini, Gentile da Fabriano, and Pisanello. A half-crazed Botticelli tossed several of his own “decadent” works onto the Bonfire of the Vanities in 1497.

Italian art has, unfortunately, not been immune from the turbulent influence of the peninsula. But the history of Italian art and architecture isn’t short of happy endings, either. Many works we admire today have dodged a bullet or two during the journey to the 21st century.

If you love Renaissance art, a trip to the Uffizi is a no-brainer. In no other world museum is time so tangible. Walking from room to room, you’ll see painting transform itself from the Gothic of Andrea Orcagna and Lorenzo Monaco through the High Renaissance of Botticelli and Michelangelo to the 16th-century Mannerism of Pontormo and Andrea del Sarto.

Alas, however, thanks to the wheeze of bolting on compulsory entrance to temporary exhibitions, a ticket now costs €10 with a €4 booking fee (essential if you want to dodge a biblical queue) on top. Ouch.

Tickets to the Accademia, Michelangelo’s marble showcase, work the same. The churches of Santa Croce and San Lorenzo, for exemplars of Brunelleschi‘s chapel architecture, are €5 and €3.50 respectively. Even the Dominican church (€2.70) and cloisters (€2.70) of Santa Maria Novella, home of frescoes by Ghirlandaio (Michelangelo’s teacher) and Uccello, charge visitors to enter.

Add all that together and a long day touring Florence’s marquee museums and churches could relieve you of almost €40 a head – before you’ve browsed one gift shop. To enjoy the greatest artists in the world, admittedly. Whose work you couldn’t possibly see, in a city as notoriously pricey as Florence, for free.

Or could you?

Read the rest in The Times

The first of three iPhone apps I’ve authored has just been approved by Apple. Instant Florence, co-created with the exceedingly smart folk at Never Odd Or Even, went on sale a few days ago.

Anyone familiar with travel apps on the iPhone knows that there are a daunting number of competitors for our new app, and writing for a startup means there’s almost no cash for marketing. Happily, most of what’s out there uses unoriginal text scraped from Wikitravel and given a shiny custom coat. Ours is original content researched and written from scratch (and also has a shiny coat). Some have been created from the bones of books. Ours has only ever been an app; it’s a square peg designed for a square hole. We think that tailoring the content to its function gives us an advantage in a crowded market. If you’re looking for a photo- and menu-driven guide to the city of the Renaissance, we think Instant Florence is the best product in the App Store. We’d love to hear your thoughts.

If you have any questions or comments about the app, do get in touch. If you want to buy Instant Florence, this link opens your iTunes account. And watch this space. There’s more coming soon.

Below are two screenshots from the app. Feel free to use them.

So, you’re heading to the eurozone with sterling at a historic low; to Italy, where inflation is at a 12-year high; and to the country’s priciest region. Are you in for a cashflow nightmare? Not necessarily.

Booking value summer accommodation for families can be tricky [Read more →]

So, who wants to hear a joke?

Q: What’s the difference between libertarianism and anarchism?

A: Under anarchism, the poor people get to shoot back.

Boom, boom. I guess that’s more a caricature than a joke, as such. Anyway, I’m not here for the standup. What I want to address is the arts, partly by way of reply to Chris’s post here last week, specifically the estimable libertarian objection to arts funding. In libertopia, arts funding is for private individuals. “There is no such thing as society” (some of them really write stuff like that, non-ironically), so spending on the collective is wasted. Immoral. Theft. In any case, the Dead Hand of the State (10,300 Google hits for a phrase I’ve never heard anyone actually speak) can only have a pernicious impact on private interaction, and what could be more private than art?

Let’s look at some evidence. [Read more →]