We have purchased The Rough Guide to France before and loved it. It was a very accurate and extremely helpful guide. Every recommendation turned out to be right on the money. The Rough Guide to Italy is a good guide, but not as good as the one for France. While the Italian history, the maps, the general area descriptions were excellent, many village / city specific recommendations were outdated and many places (mainly restaurants) listed in the book were not there in reality. We believe such differences between the two books really depend on the writers, and those who visited France simply wrote a better book. We would still recommend this book, but if you do the combination travel to France like we did, please know that the Italy version won't be as thorough and accurate as the French one.