Travel Tales: Italy, Rome, & More is a collection of travel stories of one of the travel world's most favorite destinations. Without a doubt, Rome, Firenze (Florence), Venezia (Venice), and the rest of Italy are to be sure among my favorite destinations in the world to visit. The travel stories in this book are basically divided into a number of parts. And you may ask, why is the book divided in this way? The short answer is that when asked to share their most interesting travel tales of their visits to Italy, it is no surprise that in addition to some of the more touristy stuff, there are some metaphysical stories of visitors as well because Italy does have its own share of the psychic and paranormal that influences visitors in Italy just as elsewhere.

There are also travelers' stories about some of the not-so-pleasant aspects of travel in Italy, particularly the fairly common occurrence of pickpocketing, especially by the Roma (Gypsy) populace, so travelers need to be particularly cautious and aware. Finally, solo women travelers often report a fairly common occurrence of aggressive sexual harassment in the form of fairly assertive, intrusive, verbal, and sometimes even unwelcomed physical advances. So, it is only fitting that I provide these stories for you as well—be they as they may—since these are the tales that travelers feel are important enough and therefore want to share with you.

Mostly, your own Italy travels will typically be interesting, exciting, rewarding, safe, and without incident, but odd and unpleasant things can and do happen on occasion in your travels, and visiting Italy is certainly no exception. To be sure, with its marvelous food and drink, artwork, architecture, museums, and magnificent scenery, Italy with its great cities has so much to offer. It is also one of our purposes of the True Travel Tales series to provide a cross-section of travel life in the world's most popular cities and countries, but along with the good comes sometimes a portion of the bad as well. In the True Travel Tales series, we aim to pull no punches. You'll see the good and best sides of Italy, its cities, and some of the more negative and regrettable travel occurrences in this area of the world.