Lonely Planet - Lonely Planet Discover Italy

This Is Italy

Packing your bags for every possible Italian adventure is a challenge yet Italy makes it look easy, with 47 Unesco World Heritage sites, 20 champion soccer teams, 40 European Unionacclaimed cheeses and (get this) one million vineyards, all crammed into a country the size of a Prada clutch.

Just come as you are, and let Italy show you how its done. In a couple of days youll have a new wardrobe; in a week youll be on a Vespa, making gestures that could get you arrested elsewhere. Youve got places to go: an Amalfi Coast beach, maybe an opera in a Roman amphitheatre, or your pick of Italys year-round festivals. You dont have to wait for Venice Carnevale or yet another World Cup victory to party in the streets any old saints day or country sagra (harvest fair) will do.

Hungry? Ah, thats Italys favourite word. Thanks to ancient volcanoes and an unusually sunny disposition, theres always some local, seasonal speciality bursting with flavour, and it will be delivered to you atop the best pasta or risotto you will have in this lifetime. City-state turf battles long fought by armies are now waged by pizzaioli (pizza-makers) over the correct thickness of a crust best not to get the Neapolitans and Romans started. Just eat and smile, which should be easy.

Maybe its the Mediterranean diet, but Italy wears its millennia of turbulent history extraordinarily well. Roman towns like Pompeii, Herculaneum and Ostia Antica were so well preserved by their masks of mud or volcanic ash, youll swear theyre not a day over 1950 years old. But Italy also offers glimpses into the future, with cutting-edge design showcases during Milans Salone Internazionale del Mobile and a recent boom in contemporary art museums in Venice, Turin, Naples and Rome. For big ideas, major meals and outsized personalities, Italy has your dream vacation in the bag.

Gondola ride (), Venice
JEAN-PIERRE LESCOURRET/LONELY PLANET IMAGES

Italys Top Experiences

Historic Rome

Once caput mundi (capital of the world), Rome was spawned by a wolf-suckled wild boy (according to legend), grew to be Western Europes first superpower, became the spiritual centrepiece of the Christian world, and is now the repository of over 2500 years worth of European art and architecture. From the Pantheon ( ) and promise to return.

Colosseum
IZZET KERIBAR /LONELY PLANET IMAGES

Venices Basilica di San Marco

Stepping through the portals of San Marco ( ), try to imagine what it might have been like for an illiterate, burlap-clad medieval peasant glimpsing those shimmering gold mosaic domes for the first time. Its not such a stretch once you see those millions of tiny gilt tesserae cohere into a singular heavenly vision, every leap of human imagination since the 12th century seems comparatively minor.

KRZYSZTOF DYDYNSKI /LONELY PLANET IMAGES

Romes subterranean city of the dead, from popes to paupers. ( )

A town of cave-dwellings carved out along a ravine, complete with cave hotels and churches. ( )

Two stories of grand, frescoed graves in caves. ( )

Book ahead to enter a tunnel to the tomb of St Peter under the Basilica. ( )