• A literary book written for the armchair traveller by an established travel writer.

• Passionately committed to conservation, deeply imbued with a sense of place and illustrated with spacious colour photographs of landscapes and views.

• More than just an ordinary guide-book, it has an underlying campaigning motive: to draw attention to Britain’s unspoiled landscapes and encourage belief in the value of conservation.

• Provides all the information you need to plan a journey, find accommodation or prepare for a long-distance walk.

• Written by Tim Jepson, previously Rome-Italy correspondent for The Sunday Telegraph, commissioning editor for their travel section and now writing for National Geographic.In Wild Italy, Tim Jepson leaves the well-worn tourist haunts of traditional guide books behind him in search of fresher pleasures. He offers a rural, rather than an urban Italy, revealing the best of the long walks, mountain hideaways, woods, plains, sea coasts and remote islands where travellers can still find a refuge from the modern world.

He explores the whole country from its Alp-studded waist to its distant toe kicking the football of Sicily towards Africa. Like an unhurried lover, he works his way down thigh and shin, following the line of the Apennines, locating the pressure points between continental and peninsular Italy, pinching to see where the prosperous north gives way to the Mediterranean south, looking for those last empty stretches of littoral, down one side and up the other, where the bathers have yet to set up their parasols.