This is a travel book with a difference! It takes you for short walks through Tuscany or you can take on the challenge of walking from Florence to Siena. Its well researched and most of the walks can be done using public transport.

Imagine that you are standing on a vantage point at the edge of a Tuscan hill village: you are gazing over one of the richest and most varied landscapes in Europe. Here are vineyards producing some of the world's finest wines, and a panorama of wild mountain grandeur. Your view will almost certainly take in other villages clustering around the upper reaches of some hill, or the russet roofs of a fortified town deep in a valley. These elegant yet intimate places are captured in Hugh Palmer's... read more --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

With 200 glorious color photographs, Hidden Tuscany explores the country churches, garden grottos, forgotten villas,
and other little-known gems off the beaten path in Italy's most popular and picturesque region. Cunaccia's engaging text reveals the diverse histories and influences of these hidden treasures. CESARE CUNACCIA is a Venice based historian whose published work includes articles for Architectural Digest and Rizzoli's Italian Parks and Gardens.

Each book in this bestselling series, edited by Hugh Johnson, the world's foremost wine writer, offers a comprehensive and inspirational guide to traveling in one of the world's top wine regions. Evocative descriptions of wine routes are accompanied by detailed maps showing the route and surrounding vineyards. Each title also includes the author's recommendations for hotels, restaurants, and producers.Maureen Ashley, Master of Wine, is a specialist in Italian wines and writes regularly for several of the UK's major wine magazines. She is consultant to the Italian Trade Centre and lectures and gives tutored tastings on Italian wines throughout the UK. Her enthusiasm and love of Italian's culture, countryside,
and the Italian way of life permeates all her writing.

Going to Tuscany? Don't leave without Carla Capalbo's 'The Food Lover's Guide to Tuscany,' a 383-page paperback crammed with essential and fascinating information, not only on foods, but on restaurants, food markets, and festivals, artisan shops, and olive oil and wine producers.
A chapter is devoted to each of the thirteen distinct sub-regions of Tuscany for which road maps, intended to help you plan your trip, are provided. Within each chapter Ms Capalbo lists important cities and towns and their outstanding offerings, be it a restaurant, a wine factory, a cheese shop, or a store in which to buy 'table crafts.' Sidebars discuss native foods, such as Tuscany's famous beans,
fagioli de Sorana.[...]

Illustrated with a fantastic array of culinary and scenic images, this latest
entry in HarperCollins's "beautiful cookbook" series will find a place both on
the coffee table and in the kitchen. Chef and cooking instructor De'Medici
( Italy the Beautiful Cookbook ) here focuses on the relatively small region
of Tuscany, where a splendid--and vast--tradition in cookery has flourished for centuries,
based, she writes, on a simple "love of wine, freshly pressed olives and bread."
Well organized by menu course, the cuisine represented here is rich in fragrant soups
fortified with crusty country breads and polentas made with chestnut or garbanzo flours.[...]

In this memoir of her buying, renovating, and living in an abandoned villa
in Tuscany, Frances Mayes reveals the sensual pleasure she found living in rural Italy, and the generous spirit she brought with her. She revels in the sunlight and the color, the long view of her valley, the warm homey architecture, the languor of the slow paced days, the vigor of working her garden, and the intimacy of her dealings with the locals. Cooking, gardening, tiling and painting are never chores, but skills to be learned, arts to be practiced, and above all
to be enjoyed. At the same time Mayes brings a literary and intellectual mind to bear on the experience,
adding depth to this account of her enticing rural idyll.

Work's still not completely finished on Bramasole, the Tuscan house that California-based
poet and bestselling author Frances Mayes bought a decade ago and has been fixing up every summer since. Nevertheless, in Bella Tuscany, she goes out--in search of Italy and Italian life. The sequel to Under the Tuscan Sun is awash with sensual discovery, from Sicilian markets with "rainbows of shining fish on ice" to the aqueous dream of Venice "shimmering in the diluted sunlight."
Wherever she is, Mayes celebrates everyday rituals, such as picking wild asparagus, "dark
spears poking out of the dirt ... stalks as thin as yarn" and driving through country rains,
as "the green landscape smears across the windshield" for buffalo mozzarella and demijohns of sfuso--bulk wine kept fresh with a slick of olive oil on top. [...]

From the first page, Nancy Harmon Jenkins draws you deep into the soul of Tuscany, where she lives part of the year and where tradition heavily shades daily life. Jenkins calls Tuscans "the Yankees of Italy" because they are as frugal and plainspoken as the New Englanders with whom she grew up. Their food is elementally simple, relying heavily on the region's unique, salt-free bread, pane scicco, the intense olive oil that has become famous around the world, and beans slowly cooked in a tall clay pot, or fiasco.
Jenkins enthralls the reader as she discusses Tuscan food and how her friends and neighbors gather, raise, and prepare it. Flavors of Tuscany is dense with good food. There are roasts, the bread-based soup ribollita, crostini [...]