Villa Farnese, Caprarola
Villa Farnese rises above the village of Caprarola in northern Lazio as one of the defining Mannerist commissions of sixteenth-century Italy, designed by Jacopo Barozzi da Vignola between 1559 and…
Scrovegni Chapel
Between 1303 and 1305 the Florentine painter Giotto di Bondone covered every interior surface of the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua with a unified fresco cycle commissioned by the banker Enrico…
Cathedral Square, Ortigia
Piazza Duomo is the ceremonial heart of Ortigia, the small island that holds the historic core of Syracuse. The cathedral that gives the square its name was built over a…
Abbey of Monte Cassino
Founded around 529 by Saint Benedict of Nursia on a rocky hill some 130 kilometres southeast of Rome, the Abbey of Monte Cassino is the first house of the Benedictine…
Palladian Basilica
The Palladian Basilica is the white-stone envelope that Andrea Palladio wrapped, between 1546 and 1614, around the medieval Palazzo della Ragione of Vicenza, a Gothic communal hall built in the…
Trajan’s Column
Trajan’s Column is a Roman triumphal column inaugurated on 12 May 113 CE in the heart of the Foro di Traiano. Roughly 35 metres tall including its pedestal, it is…
St. Peter’s Square
St. Peter’s Square is the elliptical forecourt of St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City, framed by the four-row Tuscan colonnade designed by Gian Lorenzo Bernini between 1656 and 1667. At…
Egyptian Museum of Turin
The Museo Egizio is the world’s oldest museum devoted entirely to ancient Egyptian culture and the second-largest Egyptological collection after the Egyptian Museum of Cairo. It was founded in 1824…
Brion Memorial
The Brion Memorial in San Vito d’Altivole is a monumental funerary complex designed by the Venetian architect Carlo Scarpa between 1969 and 1978, commissioned by Onorina Tomasin Brion in memory…
Boboli Gardens
The Boboli Gardens are a 45,000-square-metre Medici garden laid out behind the Pitti Palace in Florence from 1549, conceived for Eleonora di Toledo, wife of Cosimo I de’ Medici. Carved…