Under the Tuscan Sun

My practice question today: The local book club is about to read "Under the Tuscan Sun" and they'd like to be able to find authentic Italian recipes, timelines of Italian history, reliable wine reviews, driving tour routes through Italy, images of old Italian houses, and/or other materials that can enhance their understanding of Italy. Help them understand how to use Boolean logic to find useful web sites, portals, magazine articles, and other resources. [Tip: identify search strings that lead to generic Italian or Tuscan tourism materials then contract that with search strings which let them drill down to specific points of focus, such as the driving tours or wine reviews.]

As you may remember from a previous post, gentle and attentive reader, I have officially decided that non-academic requests such as these are best initially attacked by a subject search on the Internet Public Library. I searched for "Italian Travel," and decided this was a search string that led to generic Italian or Tuscan tourism materials. It provided such gems as lonelyplanet.com.

I also Googled "italy" to find italiantourism.com. I "focused on" a map of Tuscany, and got information in the following categories: "general," which had a subset called "cultural." I mined it for CV terms to use as search strings that drill down to specific points of interest to these book club members. Google is also useful for image searches, for architecture and other visual interests. I used "tuscan villa" to start, and played around with it for a while to find real Tuscan homes, rather than McMansion-copycats for sale in the U.S., of which there were a frightening amount. "Tuscan architecture" ended up the best choice. What beautiful buildings!

Figuring out the controlled vocabulary gave me better search strings that led me to websites like scooterbella.com, which sells Vespa tours of Italy, and artofcookery.com, which gives Tuscan recipes. Wishing you were in Italy yet? Try using your local library catalog to search for travel books on Italy which will give you all sorts of interesting information.

Here are some other successful search strings and the subsequent websites found, on Google:

"Tuscan Wine Review" led to winereviewonline.com
"Italian History" led to knowital.com/history/tuscany/tuscany-history.html
"Tuscan Driving Tour" led to hearsajourney.com

Again, like the tip suggests, it helped to start with general sites, cull them for controlled vocabulary like "villas" or "vespas," and then use those to make more specific searches.