Travelling with Arthur and Robert

Our man Arthur

When Gary and I traveled to Europe on our honeymoon (first time on a plane for both of us), we consulted Arthur Frommer's Europe on $5/day.  Arthur was our bible and if Arthur liked it, we liked it.

In less than two weeks Eric and I head off to Rome. Not ideal tourist weather, you say? Well, my son has such a busy schedule that the only available time between now and September is balmy, lovely, uncrowded Febbraio. And does Arthur agree?

Well, I wondered if Arthur at age 83 was still with us when I picked up Frommer's Italy 2012 and saw his name had been dropped from the title. Not to worry, Arthur has a blog (http://www.frommers.com/blog/)  and an internet radio program with his daughter Pauline.  (http://wor710.com/pages/11653369.php)

Is Arthur really keeping up this pace? -- several blogs a week, a 2 hour radio show on Sundays? I'm proud of him, even if he has a ghost writer helping out. I suspect my hefty original Europe on $5/day paperback had fewer pages than the Italy 2012 edition which weighs in at 966 pages. I downloaded it to Kindle. (Arthur is so 21st century!) Of course, there are a lot more choices of travel books now than in 1973. In addition to Frommer and Fodor, there's Lonely Planet, Rick Steves, Let's Go, Rough Guides and many more. Eric is going to download a rival book, so we can have dueling itineraries.Can you picture us on a street corner, consulting our Kindles, while the gypsy children swarm around us and pick our pockets?

Critic Robert Hughes, not looking too happy

More importantly, we're both reading Robert Hughes' new book: Rome: A Cultural, Visual and Personal History. The book jacket promises "Equal parts idolizing, blasphemous, outraged and awestruck...a portrait of the Eternal City as only Robert Hughes could paint it." Though not a guide book, will Robert's view of the world capture my imagination the way Arthur's view had so many years earlier? Will we be quoting Robert throughout our trip?  If Robert devotes five pages to the story behind  the statue of Giordano Bruno in Campo dei Fiori, do we dare miss it? Do the musings of this sometimes pompous but always entertaining Australian art and culture critic warrant changing our 'must see' list? 

I can't wait to see if we'll be the only tourists at Pompeii looking for certain scatological graffiti (page 64 ) or marvelling that the Pompeiian house of Marcus Lucretius Fronto looks like "the terrace of Luigi's Pasta Palace in coastal New Jersey." (Why always the Jersey jokes?) I detect a certain insecurity in Robert, as if he hasn't completely resolved his Australian roots. Lamenting the overly pious plaster statues he grew up with in Australia in the 50's he comments: "as far as I could discover there was not one work of religious art in Australia that anyone except a weak-minded nun, and a lay one at that, could call authentic." Italy was his grand awakening.

Eric and I are ready for authenticity:  real art, architecture, ruins, real pizza, speedy trains, crazy Italian drivers. Two weeks left to finish reading Arthur and Robert, filtering through their recommendations and stories. Will it be Arthur or Robert who gets the most attention? The practical vs the philosophical, the garrulous light hearted adventurer getting the best deals vs the intellectual curmudgeon, awed by art and history. 

I have a feeling they'll be room for both.