Things to do in Italy
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FEATURED
Highlights Of Italy
8 days (Venice)
by Intrepid
Lose yourself in enchanting Venice city, Feast on scrumptious seafood on Italy's coast, Travel down the Cinque Terre's rugged coastal path, Witness a golden…Not LP reviewed
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Giolitti
This started as a dairy in 1900 and still keeps the hoards happy with succulent sorbets and creamy combinations. Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn swung by in Roman Holiday and it used to deliver marron glacé to Pope John Paul II.
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Grom
The first-ever outlet of this Slow Food–affiliated ice cream, renowned for organic flavours such as green tea, was started here in Turin. There’s another branch at Via Accademia delle Scienze 4, which keeps the same hours.
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Amon
Pop in to this family-run joint for what are possibly the best kebabs in Florence. Refreshingly nongreasy, they’re served on pita bread fresh from the oven. Admire the Egyptian kitsch on the walls while you wait.
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Caffè dei Frari
Take your espresso with a heaping of history at this century-old carved wooden bar, or recover from the sensory overload of I Frari with a sandwich, glass of wine and easy conversation at the dinky indoor cafe tables downstairs or on the Liberty-style wrought-iron balcony upstairs.
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Santo Spirito Organic Market
This monthly market attracts artisans and organic farmers from around Tuscany, with stands devoted to fresh produce, hand-painted crockery, spices gathered from Chianti hillsides and much more.
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Festivaletteratura
For five days each September, central Mantua is taken over by the Festivaletteratura, with open-air bookstalls, and readings and author discussions (some in English).
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La Fonte della Salute
It might not be quite the ‘fountain of health’ of the name, but the fruit flavours are so delicious they must surely be good for the soul.
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Tre Erre Ceramiche
Tre Erre Ceramiche has a huge selection of ceramics.
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Freya's Florence
Recommended Australian-born, Florence-based private tour guide; pay admission fees on top of guiding fee.
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Da Giggetto
The atmospheric ghetto, rustic interiors, white-jacketed waiters, Roman-Jewish cooking – who needs more? Celebrate all things fried by tucking into the marvellous carciofi alla giudia and follow on with delicious calamari (fried squid). In the warmer months, fight your way to an outside table under the shadow of the ruins of the Portico d’Ottavia.
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Osteria del Gatto e la Volpe
On the corner of Via de' Giraldi, this is a small and welcoming spot where the food is reasonable and the prices are stable. It gets its fair share of tourists, but this hasn't yet ruined what's on offer at the 'Cat and Wolf'. It's closer to a genuine Florentine experience than most of the places that line this much-trampled city.
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Gallerie dell'Accademia
Don't be fooled by Palladio's serene expansions for the former Santa Maria della Carità convent: these galleries contain more murderous intrigue, forbidden romance, shameless politicking and near-riots than the most outrageous Venetian parties. To guide you through the ocular onslaught, visits are loosely organised by style, theme and painter from the 14th to the 18th centuries, though recent restorations have temporarily shuffled round some of the masterpieces.
Rooms 1–5
Early collection highlights include Paolo Veneziano's c 1350 Coronation of Mary (room 1), which shows Jesus bestowing the crown on his mother with a gentle pat on the head. For sheer, shimmering gore,…
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Orvieto Cathedral
Confoundingly beautiful, the cathedral is otherworldly in its striped magnificence. Started in 1290, it was originally planned in the Romanesque style, but as work proceeded and architects changed, it became more Gothic. The black-and-white marble banding of the main body of the church is surpassed and complemented by the dancing polychrome colours of the façade. Pope Urban IV commissioned the cathedral to celebrate the Miracle of Bolsena in 1263, but it took 30 years to plan and three centuries to complete. It was probably started by Fra Bevignate and later additions were made by Lorenzo Maitani, Andrea Pisano and his son Nino Pisano, Andrea Orcagna and Michele…
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Palazzo Pitti
This vast palace was begun in 1458 for the Pitti family, rivals of the Medici. Cosimo I and Eleonora di Toledo acquired it in 1549 and it remained the official residence of Florence's rulers until 1919 when the Savoys gave it to the state.
The ground-floor Museo degli Argenti (Silver Museum) hosts temporary exhibitions in its elaborately frescoed audience chambers.
Raphaels and Rubens vie for centre stage in the enviable collection of 16th- to 18th-century art amassed by the Medici and Lorraine dukes in the 1st-floor Galleria Palatina . Highlights include Filippo Lippi's Madonna and Child with Stories from the Life of St Anne (aka the Tondo Bartolini; 1452–53) and…
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Museo Nazionale Romano: Palazzo Altemps
This gem of a museum houses the best of the Museo Nazionale Romano's formidable collection of classical sculpture. Many pieces come from the celebrated Ludovisi collection, amassed by Cardinal Ludovico Ludovisi in the 17th century. Prize exhibits include the 5th-century Trono Ludovisi (Ludovisi Throne), a carved marble throne depicting Aphrodite being plucked from the sea as a newborn babe. It shares a room with two colossal heads, one of which is the goddess Juno and dates from around 600 BC. The wall frieze (about half of which remains) depicts the 10 plagues of Egypt and the Exodus.
The building's baroque frescoes provide an exquisite decorative backdrop. The walls of…
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Basilica di Santa Croce
When Lucy Honeychurch, the heroine of EM Forster's A Room With a View, is stranded in Santa Croce without a Baedeker, she first panics and then, looking around, wonders why it's thought to be such an important building. After all, doesn't it look just like a barn ('a black and white facade of surprising ugliness')?
On entering, many visitors to this massive Franciscan basilica share the same reaction. The austere interior can come as something of a shock after the magnificent neo-Gothic facade, which is enlivened by varying shades of coloured marble (both it and the campanile are 19th-century additions). The church itself was designed by Arnolfo di Cambio between 1294 and…
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Certosa e Museo di San Martino
Originally built by Charles of Anjou in 1325, this former Carthisian monastery hilltop has been decorated, adorned and altered over the centuries by some of the greats of Italian art and architecture, most importantly Giovanni Antonio Dosio in the 16th century and baroque master Cosimo Fanzago a century later. Today, it's a superb repository of Neapolitan artistry, all of it wisely collected by its resident monks.
The monastery's church and the rooms that flank it contain a feast of frescoes and paintings by some of Naples' greatest 17th-century artists. In the pronaos (a small room flanked by three walls and a row of columns), Micco Spadaro's frescoes of Carthusian…
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Chiesa di Sant'Efisio
Despite its unassuming façade and modest interior, the most important church in the Stampace quarter is the Chiesa di Sant'Efisio. It's dedicated to Cagliari's patron saint, St Ephisius, a Roman soldier who converted to Christianity and later lost his head for refusing to recant his new-found faith. The church is supposedly built on the site of the martyr's prison.
He's stood the city in good stead throughout the years, saving the populus from a hideous plague in 1652 - when the church got its marble makeover - and repelling Napoleon's fleet in 1793. You can even see French cannonballs embedded in the wall beneath a picture of St Ephisius stirring up the storm that sent…
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Piazza della Signoria
Edged by historic cafes, crammed with Renaissance sculptures and presided over by the magnificent bulk of Palazzo Vecchio, this photogenic piazza is the hub of Florentine life, and has been so for centuries.
Whenever the city entered one of its innumerable political crises, the people would be called here as a parlamento (people's plebiscite) to rubber-stamp decisions that frequently meant ruin for some ruling families and victory for others. Scenes of great pomp and circumstance alternated with those of terrible suffering: it was here that vehemently pious preacher-leader Savonarola set fire to the city's art - books, paintings, musical instruments, mirrors, fine clothes…
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Cappelle Medicee
Nowhere is Medici conceit expressed so explicitly as in their mausoleum, the Medician Chapels. Sumptuously adorned with granite, the most precious marble, semiprecious stones and some of Michelangelo's most beautiful sculptures, it is the burial place of 49 members of the dynasty. Francesco I lies in the grandiose Cappella dei Principi (Princes' Chapel) alongside Ferdinando I and II and Cosimo I, II and III. Lorenzo il Magnifico is buried in the stark but graceful Sagrestia Nuova (New Sacristy), Michelangelo's first architectural work and showcase for three of his most haunting sculptures: Dawn and Dusk on the sarcophagus of Lorenzo, Duke of Urbino; Night and Day on the…
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Fontana Pretoria
At the civic heart of Palermo, a crowd of imposing churches and buildings surrounds the ornate Fontana Pretoria. This huge fountain fills the piazza with its tiered basins, supporting the sculptures, rippling in concentric circles. The city bought the fountain in 1573; however, the flagrant nudity of the provocative nymphs proved too much for Sicilian church-goers attending Mass at the grandly formal San Giuseppe dei Teatini, and they prudishly dubbed it the Fountain of Shame.
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St Mark's Square
Napoleon dubbed it the 'finest drawing room in Europe', and visitors and pigeons alike have been flocking here for centuries to strut and crow. There is a constant carnival atmosphere thanks to the cacophony of duelling cafe orchestras, cooing pigeons, and constant traffic of waiters serving alfresco diners.
Now that most visitors arrive in Venice via the railway station, the magical symbolism of the waterside Piazzetta San Marco has to a great extent been lost.
The piazzetta's two columns bear emblems of the city's patron saints: the winged lion of St Mark and the figure of St Theodore. From the Campanile (bell tower), you can enjoy breathtaking views. St Mark's Square…
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Torre Argentina Cat Sanctuary
Cats may be as iconic in Rome as the Colosseum, but for many of the capital's felines, life is anything but purrfect. Hundreds of kittens are abandoned at the city's volunteer-run Torre Argentina Cat Sanctuary, a common occurrence in a country where neutering pets is hardly in vogue. Expectantly, sterilisation is the shelter's primary concern, along with nursing ill and injured cats and finding them good homes right across the world.
The centre itself inhabits part of a mostly unexcavated Roman temple in the Area Sacra di Largo di Torre Argentina, close to the spot where Julius Caesar was slain in 44 BC. For the historical lowdown (ask to see the ancient latrine), join…
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Chiesa del Domine Quo Vadis?
This pint-sized church marks the spot where St Peter, fleeing Rome, met a vision of Jesus going the other way. When Peter asked: ‘Domine, quo vadis?’ (‘Lord, where are you going?’), Jesus replied, ‘Venio Roman iterum crucifigi’ (‘I am coming to Rome to be crucified again’). Reluctantly deciding to join him, Peter tramped back into town where he was arrested and executed. In the aisle are copies of Christ’s footprints; the originals are in the Basilica di San Sebastiano.
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Basilica di San Nicola
Northwest past the small Chiesa di Santa Ana is the remarkable Basilica di San Nicola, one of the south’s first Norman churches. It’s a splendid example of Puglian-Romanesque style, built to house the relics of St Nicholas (better known as Father Christmas), which were stolen from Turkey in 1087 by local fishermen. His remains are said to emanate a miraculous manna liquid with special powers. For this reason – and because he is also patron saint of prisoners and children – the basilica remains an important place of pilgrimage. The interior is huge and simple with a decorative 17th-century wooden ceiling. The magnificent 13th-century ciborium over the altar is Puglia’s…
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