Moleskine City Notebooks for Italy

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 had come out with a 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 series ended up covering four cities: Rome, Milan, Florence and Venice. (I ended up using all four; here’s why I love Moleskine City Notebooks.) Moleskine has since stopped making the original City Notebooks, but Amazon still has listings for the Italian ones, usually from resellers, so availability comes and goes:

• Moleskine City Notebook Roma (Rome)
• Moleskine City Notebook Milano (Milan)
• Moleskine City Notebook Firenze (Florence)
• Moleskine City Notebook Venezia (Venice)

The closest thing Moleskine makes today is the LUXE x Moleskine city notebooks, which combine LUXE’s city guide content with notebook pages. For Italy there’s a Rome edition, on Amazon in a pocket size and a large size. For Milan, Moleskine has a limited-edition “I am Milan” notebook with illustrations of the city on the cover. It’s a ruled notebook rather than a city notebook, but it makes a nice souvenir.