Please recommend a good map for driving around Italy and the Italian countryside. We are landing in Milan and heading to Lake Como area for 4 days. After that we will spending 8 days in the Tuscany region.

Hi Yogi,

Great screen name

We've found the Michelin maps to be quite good. You can buy them at bookstores like Barnes and Noble, or www.amazon.com carries a huge selection.

For larger areas Michelin is best. For inner cities we use viamichelin.com or mappy.com and print out street maps of the towns we will visit. (These are better thatn the tourist office walking maps - since they show one-way streets.)

We bought our driving maps on the autostrada at a service area.

AGIP is the Italian map standard-their green maps come by region and sub-region (province). They have city insets: they are available on-line or all along the auto-strade.

I've been very happy with my spiral bound 9" x 12" Michelin "Tourist and Motoring Atlas" - scale: 1cm = 3km.

FYI,

AAA has something like what TuckH describes, if not the actual atlas he uses.

I have used regional maps of the Italian Touring Club which also have very nice street maps of the towns with helpful info like parking.

Hi Yogi - I always use the 'Touring Club Italiano' regional maps.

Steve

We used an atlas from Italian Touring Club for our Umbria/Tuscany trip last year and found it invaluable.

Tracy

I too have used the regional Italian Touring Club maps and found that it didn't take very long for them to tear apart and open up at the fold lines...

My Touring Club atlas is wire-bound and focuses on the regions of Tuscany and Umbria, so we didn't have too many problems with it ripping and tearing. With that being said, I had a hard time finding it and ended up buying it online from a small distributor.

Tracy

We bought a large Michelin map book of europe and have used it for many years.

On the subject of "a large Michelin map book", I bought the spiral bound one for France and it was a (very) unwieldy 12" x 16" - impossible to deal with in the car. So, instead of that, on our recent trip I used the Michelin Regionals and they held up very well - no tearing.

For planning purposes, the Michelin regional maps work great for me. For driving, chalk up another vote for the TCI green maps. Michelin regional maps are 1:400,000 scale which gives you the big picture and is good for determining the logistics of getting from Point A to Point B, but does not provide detail for the minor roads. TCI's are 1:200,000, 4 times as detailed, showing every dirt path. (1:200,000 scale means 1 cm = 2 km, or approximately 1" = 3 miles)

Don't get me wrong... the 1:400,000 Michelin maps are more than sufficient if you are only going to be driving on the Autostrada or major/moderate two-lane roads. If you're going into little towns way out in East Nowhere though, the TCI map becomes invaluable.

bookmarking

Michelin regional maps work great but I use them in conjunction with downloaded driving directions from the viaMichelin web site. These suggest a route and even tell you how much to have ready for the tolls.

For Italy the Touring Club Italiano regional maps are absolutely brilliant.