The 100 Best Art Towns in America: A Guide to Galleries, Festivals, Lodging, and Dining

by John Villani

Book Overview

Visual arts venues Performing arts & events Wining & dining Accommodations Population

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0881506419
• ISBN13: 9780881506419
• Release Date: April 2005
• Publisher: Countryman Press
• Length: 504 Pages
• Weight: 1.53 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.2" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Art Travels

This lively guide gives a fine sense of the texture of art locales all over America. As an ardent cultural traveler, I plan to take it with me on the road for future trips. His write-ups of the places he has savored ring true and I look forward using it as a helpful guide to new destinations I plan to visit. Many are locales I had not thought of, but are now on my list. So many guidebooks present the same-old, same-old. It's nice to find one with some character. Happy trails!

The Primus Inter Pares of Guidebooks

As a lifelong world traveler (106 countries visited, and all 50 States), I consider myself a connoisseur of guidebooks in various languages, and the fourth edition of John Villani's "The 100 Best Art Towns in America" is one of the finest I've ever seen in the English language. Where others are mere compendiums that in essence are glorified phone books, Mr. Villani's is more in the nature of an artwork, for he has deftly sketched 100 communities in a way that reveals each one's soul. (Yes, communities do have "souls," and those guidebooks that do not recognize this fact are wastes of paper, no matter how fancy they've been produced.) A town's soul is manifested throughout it--in its restaurants, its hotels, its public spaces, its historic sites and annual festivals, all of which Mr. Villani covers very nicely in this edition; but the single clearest sign of any community's soul is its art scene, the realm and arena of its total creative force. Some cities, with sad souls, have high crime rates, but the best cities have high art rates, and John Villani has given us a delightfully usable work of art masquerading as a book that identifies the best 100 of those cities and towns. My sole complaint would be that he didn't pick America's best 200 art towns, or 300! At any rate, for tourists or visitors certainly, and for city planners and promoters who want to find the secret to being a successful art town, and definitely for any and all art-lovers, John Villani's "The 100 Best Art Towns in America" is THE best guidebook you can find.

Sophisticated, Easy-to-Use Guide to Art Towns !!!

When I travel, I usually need to spend a lot of time reading scores of newspapers, Chamber of Commerce information, and flyers, in order to figure out the highlights and personality of each area. Thanks to "The 100 Best Art Towns in America", the author has distilled this information into an easy-to-read, informative format, which cuts through the advertising and special interest promotional activities, allowing me to experience a more sophisticated vacation. The book also saves me from wasting time in overly-commercial towns that are usually promoted in most other travel guides. I am a resident of one such overly-commercial town, Sedona, AZ, and am delighted to see that the author has NOT included that town, and therefore, not sold-out to its national efforts to be included in all lists of "Art Towns". This book will steer you clear of timeshare and tommyhawk towns! Congratulations to John Villani for his helpful guidebook.

Splendid guide to art in small-town America

When I first bought John Villani's book, my wife said, "How cool is this...a vacation planner for the art-minded!" That's exactly what it is: a summary of what there is to see and do in 100 wonderful arts communities across the US and Canada. The author has gathered information about art galleries, art festivals, restaurants, musical events, and live theater to produce a unique compendium, distilling the essence of each town's character. To guide the reader to the best, Villani ranks the top 10 towns of under 30,000 population, along with the top 10 larger towns of 30,000 to 100,000. Any summary of so many towns must of course must leave some things out. Local partisans may may miss seeing a favorite restaurant listed in this book, or a theater, or a well-known gallery. Others, with equal home-town loyalty, may dispute Villani's rankings. But this is all beside the point: this book is a splendid guide for visitors, providing enough information to plan a trip or sample a new art venue. Travelers will discover their own delights and favorite places in each of these fine art towns. Villani's book will reward the adventurous with a taste of rural America unlike any other.

This is a good book

I disagree with the woman from Eureka Springs on several issues. Number one, I am amazed that anyone can put together such a comprehensive book. A lot of research must go into compiling all that data. If I were going to use the book to plan my trips to specfic events I would call a visitor's bureau ahead of time to inform myself futher (so that I dont' miss a festival if it's erroneously printed...) And I would also EXPECT to pay $100-$150 for a night at a B & B in a resort town of Eurekea Springs' size. Even rooms at the chain hotels go for almost $100 there. And I haven't been there in years. Heck, in swankier areas I'd expect to pay $300 at a B & B the way things are going today. As to the omission of the brewery in Kansas City...I believe it was metioned in a previous edition of the book...this is after all a series of books. I'll say it again: I think there is an amazing wealth of information in this book--there were events listed in a town an hour from where I live that I'd never heard of!!! It's not that I have my head in the sand so much as this particular town has such a wealth of arts activites that I simply wasn't aware of some of them...I think that's got to be the difficulty the author and the publisher face: so much info, so little space. It's meant to be an overview, not a gospel. The author covers so many places that only a few pages are devoted to each one--I'm just glad to know about these towns that I didnt' know about before. Neat idea for a book.