Curated category
World Heritage Sites in Italy
- Syracuse, SicilySyracuse, on the southeastern coast of Sicily, was once described by the Roman orator Cicero as "the most beautiful and largest Greek city." That assessment…
- HerculaneumHerculaneum sits beneath the modern Italian town of Ercolano, a city of Roman streets and painted walls frozen in place since the 1st century AD.
- VeniceVenice sits on 126 islands in a shallow lagoon wedged between the mouths of the Po and the Piave rivers in northeastern Italy.
- PompeiiPompeii was a city of 10,000 to 20,000 people, alive with bakeries, wine shops, public baths, and the ordinary arguments of everyday life.
- RavennaRavenna sits in the flatlands of northern Italy, an inland city that was once washed by the Adriatic Sea, and it has been the capital of more empires than…
- GenoaGenoa sits wedged between the Ligurian Sea and the Apennine Mountains, a city that Petrarch once called la Superba, "the superb one," for its glories on the…
- Mount EtnaMount Etna stands 3,403 metres above the east coast of Sicily, a figure measured in September 2024 that refuses to stay still.
- TarquiniaTarquinia sits on a long plateau in central Italy, and beneath the ground around it lie the painted rooms of the dead. More than 6,000 tombs have been…
- Villa Romana del CasaleIn 1929, archaeologist Paolo Orsi began digging into the Sicilian soil near Piazza Armerina. He uncovered a Roman villa that had been buried for over eight…
- VicenzaVicenza sits at the northern base of Monte Berico, straddling the River Bacchiglione in the Veneto region of northeastern Italy.
- ColosseumThe Colosseum stands in the centre of Rome, an elliptical shell of travertine limestone and volcanic rock that once roared with the sounds of 65,000…
- Appian WayThe Appian Way stretches from the heart of Rome to the port of Brindisi at the southeastern tip of Italy, covering a distance that took armies days to march…
- RomeRome is the only city on earth that contains another sovereign nation entirely within its borders. Vatican City, the smallest country in the world, sits…