The North6 places
- TriesteItaly's least Italian city and proud of it: a grand Habsburg port facing the Adriatic with Vienna at its back, all…
- TurinItaly's first capital and the Savoy royal seat: eighteen kilometres of elegant arcades, baroque cafés that invented the…
- The Cinque TerreFive impossibly pretty fishing villages of stacked pastel houses clinging to the cliffs of the Ligurian coast, linked…
- The DolomitesA whole range of pale limestone towers that turn rose and orange at sunset, standing over green meadows instead of the…
- VeniceThe only city on earth built entirely on water: a labyrinth of canals, marble palaces, and footbridges where every…
- VeronaA first-century Roman amphitheatre still in weekly use, staging full-scale opera to twenty thousand people under the…
Rome & Lazio5 places
- La Tuscia — Etruscan LazioThe country north of Rome that Italians say the rest of the world forgets: painted Etruscan tombs where 2,500-year-old…
- RomeThe Eternal City, literally: the Colosseum and Forum of the ancient empire, the Pantheon's two-thousand-year-old dome…
- Abruzzo — Gran Sasso & the Wild ApenninesItaly's empty quarter, an hour from Rome: the highest Apennine peaks over a steppe-like plateau nicknamed "little…
- The Park of the Monsters (Bomarzo)A grieving Renaissance prince spent decades filling the wood below his castle with giant stone monsters: a screaming…
- Civita di Bagnoregio (the dying town)A medieval town sits alone on a crumbling pinnacle of rock, reachable only by a long footbridge, and every year a…
Tuscany & Umbria5 places
- Le Marche & UrbinoThe region Italians call "a Molise that made it": Tuscany's hills without Tuscany's crowds, a perfect Renaissance city…
- LuccaA Tuscan town that kept its complete Renaissance ramparts and then planted trees on top of them, so the defensive wall…
- Umbria — Orvieto, Assisi & the Hill TownsTuscany's quieter neighbour: stone towns standing on volcanic outcrops above oak woods, a cathedral façade in Orvieto…
- FlorenceThe city where the Renaissance happened: Brunelleschi's dome over a sea of terracotta roofs, Michelangelo's David, and…
- The Val d'OrciaThe exact Tuscany of the imagination, rolling wheat and clay hills with lone cypress rows leading to farmhouses…
Emilia-Romagna3 places
- FerraraA Renaissance city built to a plan, with a genuine moated castle in the middle of it, nine kilometres of intact walls…
- Bologna & Emilia-RomagnaThe gastronomic heart of Italy, a region where the everyday food is arguably the country's best, anchored by Bologna, a…
- Ravenna's MosaicsAn unassuming town in the flatlands that was once the capital of the western Roman Empire, holding some of the…
Naples & Campania3 places
- Amalfi CoastPastel towns stacked impossibly down cliffs into a turquoise sea — Positano, Amalfi, and Ravello strung along one of…
- NaplesItaly at maximum volume: the city that invented pizza, living raucously on top of Greek and Roman foundations under…
- Pompeii & HerculaneumTwo Roman towns buried alive by Vesuvius in AD 79 and dug back out, one enormous and famous, the other smaller and far…
The Deep South2 places
- Puglia — Lecce, the Trulli & the Salento CoastItaly's heel: a baroque city carved out of butter-soft golden limestone, whitewashed hill towns, whole villages of…
- The Sassi of MateraA town of houses dug into a limestone ravine, lived in for something like nine thousand years. Seventy years ago the…
Sicily2 places
- San Vito Lo Capo & the Zingaro ReserveThe beach Sicilians themselves call the most beautiful they've ever seen: a white crescent under a headland at San Vito…
- Mount EtnaThe most active volcano in Europe, and one you can actually climb toward, walking over black lava that was liquid a few…