How many guidebooks do you take for a month in Tuscany? And which ones? If you haven't been to Tuscany before, you may have to rely on your brother in law's memories of his 1982 "Ten best Chianti vineyards in Tuscany - all you can drink" tour. It may not be comprehensive, but the good news is that his memories of it probably won't take more than ten seconds to share with you
Or you could scan the covers of the guidebooks in the stores and pick the one with the best photo. Which basically comes down to a choice of four, all of which involve cypress trees. The one with the cypress trees lining the road; the one with the cypress trees, the old villa and the green fields; the one with the cypress trees, the old villa and the red field poppies; or the one with the cypress trees, the old villa and the golden fields. No I'm not kidding. Get down to the bookstore.
 Well maybe you should weigh them and take the lightest. At least if it's a useless guide, when you get to Low Cost Air's check-in counter, you probably won't have to scrabble through your luggage looking for stuff to jettison to make their ridiculous weight limit. One thing you can be sure of, if you take a guidebook you will end up going to places the guidebook recommends. And guess what is awaiting you there. All the other people who bought the guidebook. Or any other guidebook. Because if guidebooks were people they would all be arrested immediately and locked up, as they are all hopelessly incestuously related, and it would take a month of Sundays to work out who did what to whom.
Worse than this, it seems highly likely that the authors of these guidebooks may not have been anywhere remotely connected to Tuscany. Or if they did they used a guide book to find their way around. Don't believe me? OK, I can handle the scepticism but the lack of trust is an ego sapper. But lets look at the facts. Grab any guidebook and look at it. Do vivid personal experiences leap out of the pages inspiring you to broaden your horizons? Or when you get down to it does it read a bit like a laundry list. A list that you can tick on completion. Been there, done that.
But hey, I hear you say, don't blame it on the bossa nova, this is what being a tourist is all about. Well, I will defy almost anyone to visit 10 churches and see 100 religious frescos and not end up with a vague impression of torture, redemption and winged cherubs. You could write a diary of every place you visited just to keep them filed right. But what would you do with it when you got home. An old-fashioned slide evening comes to mind. Without the slides. Don't call me, I'll call you.
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