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Museo Amedeo Lia
This fine-arts museum in a restored 17th-century friary is La Spezias star cultural attraction. The collection spans from the 13th to 18th centuries and includes paintings by masters such as Tintoretto, Montagna, Titian and Pietro Lorenzetti. Also on show are Roman bronzes and eccl
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Palazzo Bianco
Flemish, Spanish and Italian artists feature at Palazzo Bianco, the third of the triumvirate of palazzi that are together known as the Musei di Strada Nuova. Rubens’ Venere e Marte (Venus and Mars) and Van Dyck’s Vertumna e Pomona are among the highlights, which also include works
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Parco Regionale dei Colli Euganei
Southwest of Padua, the Euganean Hills feel a world away from the urban sophistication of Venice and the surrounding plains. To help you explore the walled hilltop towns, misty vineyards and bubbling hot springs of the regional park, click onto www.turismopadova.it, or grab informa
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Curia
The Forums Curia, the meeting place of the Roman Senate, was rebuilt by Julius Caesar, Augustus, Domitian and Diocletian, before being converted into a church in the Middle Ages. What you see today is a 1937 reconstruction of Diocletians building. The bronze doors are copies – the
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Catacombe dei Cappuccini
These catacombs house the mummified bodies and skeletons of some 8000 Palermitans who died between the 17th and 19th centuries. Earthly power, gender, religion and professional status are still rigidly distinguished, with men and women occupying separate corridors, and a first-clas
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Casa Rossini
In 1792 famous composer Rossini was born in a typical Pesaro townhouse that is now the Casa Rossini. His mother was a singer, his father a horn player and the young lad was composing when he was knee-high to a grasshopper. Prints, personal items and portraits provide an insight int
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Ponte dell’Accademia
The wooden Ponte dell’Accademia was built in 1933 as a temporary replacement for an 1854 iron bridge, but this span, arched like a cat’s back, remains a beloved landmark. Engineer Eugenio Miozzis notable works include the Lido Casino, but none has lasted like this elegant little fo
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Scuola dei Battuti
The eye-catching Scuola dei Battuti is covered inside and out with 16th-century frescoes by Ludovico Pozzoserrato. The building was once home to a religious lay group known as battuti (beaters) for their enthusiastic self-flagellation. The interior sala is only open to the public o
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Valentina Cubi
The eponymous Valentina Cubi is blazing a trail with her state-of-the-art, ten hectare, certified organic winery. Cubi uses biodynamic methods and, subject to the quality of the years harvest, produces one of the few natural, sulphate-free valpolicellas. Despite being new to the bu
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Castello Visconteo
Looming over the old town is the red-brick Castello Visconteo, built in 1360 for Galeazzo II Visconti. Inside the forbidding ramparts is an enormous walled garden, where art exhibits and wine tastings are held in spring and summer. The castle is also home to Musei Civici , which ho
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Albero della Fecondità
A rather risqué surprise lurks underneath this 13th-century former wheat store. Its loggia shelters the Fonte dellAbbondanza (Fountain of Abundance), a now decommissioned public drinking fountain. But its the extraordinary fresco known as the Albero della Fecondità (Fertility Tree)
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Spiaggia di Porto Ferro
The Spiaggia di Porto Ferro is a fabulous, unspoilt beach, much loved by local surfers. Hidden behind thick tracts of pine woods about six kilometres north of Torre del Porticciolo, its 2km of sands and lovely azure waters rarely get as busy as the better-known beaches in the area.
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Rocce Rosse
If you have a moment in Arbatax, head across the road from the port and behind the petrol station to the Rocce Rosse (red rocks). Like the ruins of some fairy-tale castle, these bizarre, weather-beaten rock formations dropping into the sea are well worth a camera shot or two, frame
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Pinacoteca Stuard
Giuseppe Stuard was a 19th-century Parmese art collector who amassed 500 years worth of epoch-defining art linking the Tuscan masters of the 1300s to the novecento romantics. In 2002 the collection was moved into a wing of this 10th-century Benedictine monastery dedicated to St Pau
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Chiesa di Sant’Eufemia
Four women saints were crowded under the roof of the original AD 890 church here, but Sts Dorothy, Tecla and Erasma weren’t as big a draw as Byzantine Christian martyr Euphemia. She was thrown to hungry lions, but after biting off her hand, the lions refused to eat her holy virgin
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Cava Museo
To learn how the Romans worked with marble, visit this surprisingly informative, open-air museum adjoining the souvenir shop across from the quarry entrance. Dont miss the B&W shots of marble blocks being precariously slid down the lizza (mountain pathway) to the bottom of the
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Fontana dellImmacolatella
Diva of the local fountain scene, the Fontana dellImmacolatella is a grand three-arched affair. Known also as the Fontana del Gigante, it was built by Michelangelo Naccherino and Pietro Bernini in 1601. Two minor arches, under which stand statues of river gods, flank a grand centra
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Campobianco
A few kilometres north of the beach at Canneto lies the Campobianco quarry, where huge gashes of white rock streak down the green hillside. These are the result of extensive pumice quarrying, which was an important local industry until 2000, when UNESCO called for curtailment of mi
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Sedile Dominava
Incongruously wedged between racks of lemon-themed souvenir merchandise, this 15th-century domed palazzo has exquisite, albeit faded, original frescoes. Crowned by a cupola, the terrace, open to the street on two sides, was originally a meeting point for the town’s medieval aristoc
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Palazzo Granafei
A 16th-century Renaissance-style palace named for the two different families who owned it. The building is of interest because it houses the huge ornate capital that used to sit atop one of the Roman columns that marked the end of the Appian Way (the rest of the column is in Lecce)
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