T he national tourist site, enit.it/uk/ , is unlikely to tell you anything you don't already know. initaly.com is better, but may try to redirect you to one of its many advertisers. Italy's travel websites, however, are generally atrocious. Flying

ryanair.co.uk flies to Pisa, Alghero, Ancona, Bologna, Brescia, Venice, Milan, Pescara and Genoa; Buzz (buzzaway.com ) goes to Milan. Go (go-fly.co.uk ) serves Rome, Milan, Naples, Bologna and Venice. If you want to book on alitalia.co.uk , you'll need to join their MilleMiglia club. But their flights are sold on all the major sites, so it's probably not worth the effort unless you want to collect their air miles.

By train and bus

Bus travel is organised on a regional basis, and links to some of the local carriers can be found at initaly.com . Fs-on-line.com does have an online ticket service, but at the time of writing it had been suspended. Even more ominously, the timetables were out of date. Fortunately, Italian timetables are published by Deutsche Bahn (reiseauskunft.bahn.de ). seat61.com has more helpful information, including an explanation of how to reach Pompeii from Naples and travelling to Sicily by train - the carriages are loaded on to a ferry.

By bike

A really excellent page guide to cycling in Italy can be found at www-math.science.unitn.it/ . A mildly bad-tempered German, Thomas Driemeyer, offers his experiences of biking in the Dolomites, Lake Garda, Umbria and Tuscany at in-berlin .

Staying

One of the terms you'll come across frequently on Italian sites is agriturismo, where farmers rent out rooms and sometimes offer full board. Agritour (ware.it/Agritour/ ) describes more than 1,200 of them, and about a third can be reserved online. Agriturismo in Sardinia (sardinia.net/agritur/uk/ ) has rather less sophisticated listings for the island. Camp sites are listed at icaro.it/home_e.html , while CAI - the Club Alpino Italiano, which runs inexpensive refuges all over the country - can be visited at proxy.provincia.ra.it . B&B coverage has improved recently with the launch ofbbitalia.it . As for hotels, venere.it leads the field; italyby.com, alberghitalia.com and hotels-in-italy.com follow. bookthat.com, holidayrentals.co.uk, tuscany.net andtuscanyonline.it all offer plenty of villas, castles, apartments and cottages to rent.

Visiting

Like much else on the Italian web, the national parks portal (parks.it/Eindex.html ) is frustratingly fragmented. Musei Online (museionline.it/eng/ ) is a lot better, with elusive opening times and contact email addresses for every museum in the country. pompeiisites.org is only available in Italian, but it's worth visiting just for the shuddering browser and the photographs. Newcastle University hosts one of the best English-language archeological sites at ncl.ac.uk/ostia. Anyone intending to visit the remains of the port of Ostia Antica outside Rome should pay a visit first. The Vatican does a very poor job of promoting its museums, including the Sistine Chapel, at vatican.va ; archiginnasio.dsnet.it is a personal guide to Bologna. Bill Thayler's Gazetteer Of Italy (ukans.edu ), on the other hand, is a fantastically detailed and well illustrated historical gazetteer. The pick of the rest of the regional sites are perugiaonline.com , capriweb.com and bestofsicily.com/sights.htm .

Eating

Try timeout.com's restaurant reviews for Venice, Florence, Rome and Naples and the Fodors.com/miniguides.