Italy holds 60 UNESCO World Heritage sites — more than any other country — and the density is the point: the Renaissance in Florence, the empire in Rome, Byzantium in Ravenna, Magna Graecia in Sicily and Paestum, and Giotto in Padua and Assisi. This is the thread that runs through almost every Italian itinerary, so treat it as the spine and hang the rest off it.
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If you only do 5 things on this theme.
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Uffizi Gallery Botticelli's Birth of Venus, and the greatest Renaissance collection anywhere -
Vatican Museums & Sistine Chapel Seven kilometres of galleries ending at Michelangelo's ceiling -
Ravenna's Byzantine Mosaics Eight UNESCO monuments — San Vitale and Galla Placidia above all -
Scrovegni Chapel Giotto's complete fresco cycle of 1305 — the start of Western painting -
Valley of the Temples Eight Doric temples on a ridge above Agrigento, built from 510 BC
Everywhere else on this theme
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Rome Three thousand years of city, still lived in at full volume -
Florence The Renaissance in one walkable square mile -
Venice A city on 118 islands, with no roads and no equal -
Milan Design, finance, the Duomo and the Last Supper -
Naples Loud, layered and the birthplace of pizza -
Turin Baroque arcades, royal palaces and the first capital of Italy -
Bologna 40 km of porticoes, the oldest university in Europe, and the best eating in Italy -
Palermo Arab-Norman palaces, street food and Sicily's rowdy capital -
Verona A Roman arena that still stages opera every summer -
Genoa A maritime republic's palaces above Europe's densest old town -
Siena A Gothic city built around the shell-shaped Campo -
Pisa The Field of Miracles, and a real city behind it -
Lucca Renaissance walls wide enough to cycle round the whole town -
Trieste Habsburg grandeur on the Adriatic, and Italy's coffee capital -
Padua Giotto's chapel, Europe's oldest botanical garden and a student city - Vicenza Palladio's home town — an architectural textbook you can walk
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Ferrara A moated castle, Renaissance town planning and bicycles everywhere -
Parma Prosciutto, Parmigiano, Correggio's frescoes and Verdi's country -
Modena Balsamic vinegar, a Romanesque cathedral and Ferrari next door -
Ravenna The best Byzantine mosaics outside Istanbul -
Rimini Fifteen kilometres of Adriatic beach — and Fellini's home town -
Lecce Baroque carved in soft golden stone — the Florence of the south -
Matera A city carved into a ravine and lived in for 9,000 years -
Syracuse Ortigia's island old town and the greatest Greek theatre in Sicily -
Noto The set-piece of Sicilian late baroque, rebuilt after the 1693 quake -
Ragusa Two towns on two hills — Ibla is the beautiful one -
Taormina A cliff-top Greek theatre looking straight at Etna -
Agrigento The base for the Valley of the Temples — Italian Capital of Culture 2025 -
Cagliari Sardinia's capital — a walled hill town with a city beach -
Perugia Etruscan walls, a hilltop corso and Umbria Jazz every July -
Assisi St Francis's town, and Giotto's frescoes above his tomb -
Orvieto A tufa plateau, a striped cathedral and a city underneath it -
Urbino The ideal Renaissance court, and Raphael's birthplace -
Ascoli Piceno A travertine city around one of Italy's handsomest piazzas -
Bolzano German-speaking, vineyard-ringed, and home to Ötzi the Iceman -
Trento A frescoed Renaissance city at the foot of the Dolomites -
Aosta A Roman town under the highest mountains in the Alps -
Bergamo A Venetian-walled upper town above the Lombard plain -
Brescia A Roman forum, a Lombard monastery and Franciacorta on the doorstep -
Como Silk, a lakefront cathedral and the ferry pier for the whole lake -
Mantua A Gonzaga capital on three lakes, with Mantegna in the palace -
San Gimignano Fourteen surviving medieval tower-houses on a Tuscan ridge -
L'Aquila A rebuilt mountain capital at the foot of the Gran Sasso -
Campobasso Molise's hilltop capital, under a Monforte castle -
Reggio Calabria A seafront promenade facing Sicily, and the Riace Bronzes -
Udine Venetian squares, Tiepolo frescoes and the Friulian wine hills -
Ancona The Marche's port and airport, on the only headland of the central Adriatic -
Borromean Islands A baroque palace garden, a botanical island and a fishing village, all on Lake Maggiore -
Colosseum The largest amphitheatre ever built, and still the symbol of Rome -
Roman Forum & Palatine Hill The civic centre of the ancient world, and the hill Rome was founded on -
Pantheon The best-preserved building of ancient Rome — and still the largest unreinforced concrete dome on earth -
St Peter's Basilica The largest church in the world, over the tomb of the apostle -
Trevi Fountain Rome's baroque set piece, fed by an aqueduct built in 19 BC -
Borghese Gallery Bernini's sculpture at its most astonishing, in a villa in a park -
Castel Sant'Angelo Hadrian's mausoleum, later a papal fortress with an escape corridor -
Villa d'Este, Tivoli Five hundred fountains on a hillside, all powered by gravity -
Hadrian's Villa An emperor's 120-hectare private city outside Rome -
Ostia Antica Rome's port town — as complete as Pompeii, and half an hour from the centre -
Cerveteri Etruscan Necropolis A city of Etruscan tombs laid out with streets and squares - Tarquinia Painted Tombs Six thousand rock-cut tombs, two hundred of them frescoed
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Sacro Bosco, Bomarzo A 16th-century park of giant stone monsters -
Montecassino Abbey The mother house of Western monasticism, rebuilt after 1944 -
Florence Duomo & Brunelleschi's Dome The largest masonry dome ever built, raised without a supporting frame -
Accademia Gallery — Michelangelo's David Five metres of Carrara marble, carved when Michelangelo was 26 -
Ponte Vecchio The only Florentine bridge the retreating Germans spared in 1944 -
Pitti Palace & Boboli Gardens The Medici's later home, with the garden that set the model for Versailles -
Leaning Tower of Pisa A bell tower that started tilting during construction in 1173 -
Volterra An Etruscan walled town that still works alabaster -
Piazza del Campo The shell-shaped square the Palio is run around, twice each summer -
Carrara Marble Quarries The white mountains Michelangelo chose his blocks from -
St Mark's Basilica Eight thousand square metres of gold mosaic, over a stolen apostle -
Doge's Palace The seat of the Venetian Republic, and the Bridge of Sighs -
Rialto Bridge & Market The Grand Canal's oldest crossing, with the city's fish market beside it -
Murano & Burano Glass furnaces on one lagoon island, painted fishermen's houses on the next -
Verona Arena A first-century amphitheatre that stages a full opera season every summer -
Villa La Rotonda Palladio's most copied building — the model for a thousand porticoes -
Ötzi — South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology The 5,300-year-old iceman, kept at -6°C in the middle of Bolzano -
MUSE Science Museum Renzo Piano's museum of the alpine world, built as a mountain in section -
Leonardo's Last Supper A wall in a refectory, seen 35 people at a time by advance booking only -
Duomo di Milano Six centuries of Gothic, with a walkable marble roof -
Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II The world's oldest shopping arcade still in use, opened in 1877 -
Bergamo Città Alta A walled upper town reached by funicular — Venetian walls, UNESCO-listed -
Certosa di Pavia A Carthusian monastery with the most ornate façade in Lombardy -
Pompeii A Roman town stopped mid-morning on 24 October AD 79 -
Herculaneum Smaller than Pompeii, buried deeper — and with the upper floors still standing - Naples National Archaeological Museum Everything portable that came out of Pompeii and Herculaneum
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Campi Flegrei A collapsed supervolcano west of Naples, with Roman ruins in its craters -
Paestum Three Doric temples better preserved than almost anything in Greece -
Certosa di Padula One of the largest monasteries in Europe, with a 350-column cloister -
Reggia di Caserta The largest royal palace in the world by volume, with a 3 km water axis -
Castel del Monte Frederick II's octagonal puzzle of a castle, alone on a Puglian hill -
Otranto Italy's easternmost town, with a cathedral floor mosaic of the whole world -
Riace Bronzes Two Greek warriors pulled from the sea in 1972, in Reggio's national museum -
Gerace A Norman hill town with Calabria's largest cathedral -
Taormina Greek Theatre A Hellenistic theatre framing Etna — still used for summer concerts -
Monreale Cathedral 6,500 m² of Byzantine gold mosaic in a Norman cathedral above Palermo -
Cappella Palatina The Norman kings' chapel — Byzantine mosaics under an Arab wooden ceiling -
Ortigia & the Neapolis of Syracuse A baroque island old town, and the largest Greek theatre in Sicily behind it -
Villa Romana del Casale 3,500 m² of Roman floor mosaic, preserved by a landslide -
Segesta An unfinished Doric temple alone on a hillside, and a theatre above it -
Selinunte The largest archaeological park in Europe, on an empty stretch of coast -
Su Nuraxi di Barumini The finest of Sardinia's 7,000 bronze-age nuraghi, and a UNESCO site -
Orgosolo A Barbagia shepherd village covered in political murals since 1969 -
The Two Towers, Bologna Asinelli and Garisenda — the survivors of a medieval skyline of a hundred towers -
Museo Ferrari, Maranello The heart of the Motor Valley, next door to the factory -
Museo Egizio, Turin The oldest Egyptian museum in the world, and the largest outside Cairo -
Mole Antonelliana Turin's 167-metre landmark, now the National Cinema Museum -
Reggia di Venaria Reale A Savoy hunting palace the size of a town, restored after decades as a barracks -
Sacra di San Michele An abbey built onto a rock spike above the Val di Susa — Piedmont's symbol - Palazzi dei Rolli, Genoa Forty-two Renaissance palaces that took turns hosting visiting heads of state
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Basilica of St Francis, Assisi Two churches stacked over the saint's tomb, frescoed by Giotto and Cimabue -
Orvieto Cathedral The most extravagant striped façade in Italy, and Signorelli's Last Judgement -
Ducal Palace, Urbino Federico da Montefeltro's court, with Piero della Francesca's Flagellation -
Saepinum A complete small Roman town in a field — free, and usually empty -
Aquileia Basilica The largest early-Christian floor mosaic in the West, laid around 320 AD -
Miramare Castle A white Habsburg castle on a promontory, inside a marine reserve -
Cividale del Friuli Julius Caesar's foundation, and the Lombards' first Italian capital -
Fénis Castle The most photographed of the Aosta Valley's seventy-odd castles -
Abbazia di San Fruttuoso A tenth-century abbey in a cove reachable only on foot or by boat -
Pietrabbondante A Samnite theatre and temple at 1,000 m, facing the mountains it was aligned on -
Agnone & the Marinelli bell foundry The oldest family firm in Italy — casting church bells since around 1040 -
Venosa Horace’s birthplace, with an unfinished abbey built from Roman and Jewish stone -
Melfi Castle Frederick II’s Norman-Swabian castle under the extinct Vulture volcano -
Metaponto Fifteen standing Doric columns of a Greek temple where Pythagoras is said to have died -
Basilica of the Holy House, Loreto One of the most visited Marian shrines in the world, inside a fortified basilica -
Recanati Leopardi’s hill town — the “infinite” hedge and the view he wrote about -
Forte di Bard A nineteenth-century fortress blocking the valley, now the Museum of the Alps
The regions that deliver on it
- Aosta Valley Italy's smallest region, under the four highest mountains in the Alps
- Piedmont Barolo, white truffles, royal Turin and the Alps at the foot of the plain
- Liguria The Italian Riviera — Cinque Terre, Portofino and pesto's home port
- Lombardy Milan, the great lakes and the Alps of Valtellina
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South Tyrol German-speaking Italy under the Dolomites -
Trentino Dolomite valleys, Lake Garda's northern tip and Italy's alpine lakes - Veneto Venice, Verona, Palladio's villas and the Dolomites of Cortina
- Friuli Venezia Giulia Habsburg Trieste, Roman Aquileia and Italy's finest white wines
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Emilia-Romagna Parmigiano, prosciutto, Ferrari and Ravenna's mosaics - Tuscany The Renaissance, the Chianti hills and the coast most visitors miss
- Umbria The green heart of Italy — Assisi, hill towns and no coastline
- Marche Renaissance Urbino, the Conero cliffs and the Sibillini mountains
- Lazio Rome and the Vatican — and Etruscan tombs, volcanic lakes and a coast
- Abruzzo The wildest Apennines — bears, national parks and a trabocchi coast
- Molise The region Italians joke doesn't exist — mountains, tratturi and Samnite ruins
- Campania Naples, Pompeii, the Amalfi Coast and the islands of the bay
- Puglia Trulli, baroque Lecce, whitewashed towns and two seas
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Basilicata Matera's cave city, the Lucanian Dolomites and a sliver of Tyrrhenian coast - Calabria Tropea's cliffs, three national parks and the Riace Bronzes
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Sicily Greek temples, Arab-Norman Palermo, Etna and its own archipelagos - Sardinia Caribbean-clear water, 7,000 nuraghi and a mountain interior
Other ways to travel Italy
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Food & wine Regional to the point of parochial — and all the better for it -
Coast & islands 7,900 km of coastline and around eighty inhabited islands -
Italian lakes Como, Garda, Maggiore — the Grand Tour's original destination -
Mountains & the Dolomites The Dolomites, the western Alps and the wild Apennines - UNESCO Italy Sixty World Heritage sites — the largest tally of any country
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Borghi & villages The hill towns that carry I Borghi più belli d'Italia and the Orange Flag -
Nature & national parks 25 national parks, from alpine glaciers to volcanic islands - Spirituality & pilgrimage Rome, Assisi, and the pilgrim roads that connect them
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Thermal baths & wellness Volcanic Italy's other output — hot water, since the Romans -
Sport & the outdoors Dolomiti Superski, the Giro's climbs and Garda's windsurfing - Shopping & markets Milan's Quadrilatero, Florence's leather and the weekly market habit
- Events & festivals The Palio, Carnevale, the Biennale and an opera season in a Roman arena
- Luxury Italy Portofino, the Costa Smeralda, Capri and the great lake villas