Arranged in the form of seven detailed walking tours through Venice, this literary companion provides an illuminating guide to the streets, palaces, churches, and canals that make up this exquisite city. Illustrations.

Some of Italy's best-known writers, including Luigi Pirandello, Natalia Ginzburg, Alberto Moravia, and Antonio Tabucchi, join Italy's rising literary stars to take the reader on a panoramic tour of both city and countryside, across the social spectrum, surveying the country's rich cultural history. Explore Italy's popular tourist destinations and out-of-the-way spots under the fresh and even startling light cast by these eighteen diverse and exciting stories, most of which are available here in English for the first time. Italy is consistently one of the top five travel destinations in the world for American travellers. For those who wish to reach beyond the stereotypes and discover an Italy that's off the beaten path, as well as new insights along familiar, well-travelled roads, these stories -- arranged geographically for the traveller, armchair or otherwise -- is an excellent place to start.

London: An Illustrated Literary Companion, compiled by Rosemary Gray, captures the varying moods of the great city over recent centuries, through diary entries, with quotations, poems, essays and extracts from great works written in its honour. It is beautifully illustrated with drawings and engravings from distinguished artists, including Gustave Doré, George Cruikshank, James McNeill Whistler and Hugh Thomson, and contains contemporary prints and photographs. Designed to appeal to the booklover, the Macmillan Collector's Library is a series of beautiful gift editions of much loved classic titles. Macmillan Collector's Library are books to love and treasure.

A short and literary guide to Venice's Lido, in the Blue Guides' new Travel Monographs series.

In The Venetian Qur'an, Pier Mattia Tommasino uncovers the author, origin, and lasting influence of the Alcorano di Macometto, a book that purported to be the first printed European vernacular translation of the Qur'an.