More and more travelers are abandoning traditional guidebooks in favor of online research these days, and while I’m a huge fan of the internet I still like to have a good old-fashioned paper tome on whatever place I’m about to visit. I always supplement it with online research, but I like paper. It’s very challenging to get those little sticky flags to stay on the websites I want to refer back to.
Because I like paper, I was happy to find that the folks at Moleskine have come out with a new line of city guides. Rather than being traditional guidebooks, these little books are clever combinations of handy maps for a given city and lots of empty pages for their owners to jot down either notes from online research or on-the-ground information about that restaurant find or favorite shoe shop. There are even little sticker tabs you can apply to whatever pages you want to be able to find in a snap. It’s customize-able to whoever owns it, and it’s just a fabulous idea.
Now, a Moleskine City Notebook isn’t going to tell you the opening hours of the Duomo in Milan or the entry fee for the Colosseum in Rome, but for the traveler who’s either been to the cities covered enough to know (or have already seen) the sights, these little books could be the perfect gift. And with so many travelers doing their own research and creating their own virtual guidebooks these days, the do-it-yourself Moleskine guides might be just the place to keep all that information at your fingertips when you’re nowhere near a computer.
In Italy, the cities covered are only Milan and Rome so far. Florence and Venice are scheduled to come out soon. No matter where you’re going (in Italy or elsewhere), check out all the cities Moleskine offers.
In addition to the city notebooks themselves, there are also a few city-specific blogs to go with some of the cities covered by the city notebooks. There’s Milan and Rome for Italy, both in Italian and English. The other cities being blogged about by Moleskine are listed here.
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Thanks for this useful information about the moleskin notebooks. I was just introduced to them by a fellow journalist last year – and now, thanks to you, I can look for the Paris city notebook. You’re right that nothing takes the place of a handy notebook for getting the details on location, the details that make your trip unique.
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