I still have my Eyewitness Travel guides to Paris and Rome on hand from the 2010 trip, but I've added the Venice and the Veneto guide from the same series this time.
They're great guides for planning, but pretty heavy to cart around, especially if you're going to more than one city, as I realised last time while dragging my bag up flights of stairs from the London Underground and up to our second storey apartment. So I'm using them a lot for planning, but don't intend to take any of them with me. With that thought in mind, I also bought the Eyewitness Travel Pocket Map and Guide for each city - a very condensed version of the larger guides, with a foldout map in the back of each book. They're only 154 x 74mm in size, and less than 10mm thick, so very portable. The writing is pretty tiny though - not too bad in good light, but I'm not getting any younger, so I kept looking to see if there was anything better.
I also have the laminated StreetSmart Paris map and CityFlash/Hallwag International Rome map from the 2010 trip. They're both good clear maps, although not all the smaller streets are named. You can write on them with an erasable marker - handy for planning routes - and just wipe them clean when you're done. The Paris map includes a metro map - very handy. I'll probably take these with me.
Then I found the Everyman Mapguides. These small (124 x 74mm) books divide the city into sections, with a foldout map and information (what to see, where to eat, etc.) for each area. While not all the small streets are named, the maps are very legible, and the format means you're not trying to deal with large folding maps in the wind. These ones will be going with me.
Yes, that is a New York edition tacked on the end. Not for me - my parents are going to the US while we're in Europe, and I thought this might be handy for the couple of days they have in NYC.
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