Soon our trail descriptions will include longitude and latitude waypoints to assist those with the technology to use them. In researching, we found several online maps, including a topo map, that would be useful to hikers in Italy, techie or no.
Reit-und Wanderkarte covers the center of Europe from Denmark to Italy with the addition of Portugal. It is only in German at this point, but intends to be multi-lingual in the future. Developed in accord with the OpenStreetMap (OSM) project, it has editing and routing tools with English instructions. It is downloadable for suitable Garmin GPS products. It shows roads of all classes, including streets and mule tracks, rail lines, rivers, and 10m contour lines. Several trail types are shown, but the legend is in German and doesn't use Italian trail designations.
The Lunigiana portion is quite useful in that it includes all town and frazioni names as well as special markings for the Francigena. It would seem to compare to a 1:15,000 paper map, which is excellent.
Reit-und Wanderkarte http://www.wanderreitkarte.de/
Also part of the OSM project, is "Sly's Map" at http://maps.refuges.info/
The Wikipedia article on the OSM project at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStreetMap includes a useful table of fascinating links to different online OSM maps: street maps, nautical, airspace, etc. The first link http://www.openstreetmap.org/ leads to the main OSM map and would be helpful in planning an Italian hike.
If you know of other online map resources, please keep us advised for future updating .