Curated Itinerary
A September Week in Italy: The Grand Tour in Ten Heritage Cities
The old Grand Tour in ten heritage cities, north to south: Venice, Roman Verona and mosaic Ravenna in the north; […]
Take this route into Google Maps
From Venice — Grand Canal to Sassi di Matera, in the order we curated them.
➤ Turn on the navigator in Google MapsIt opens in the Google Maps app with every stop already loaded, in the order we put them in. From there the route is yours: pick how you travel — on foot, by bike, by public transport or by car — change where you start and where you end, drag the stops into a different order, and add places of your own along the way.
The old Grand Tour in ten heritage cities, north to south: Venice, Roman Verona and mosaic Ravenna in the north; Florence, Pisa, Siena and Assisi across Tuscany and Umbria; then Rome, Naples and the cave-city of Matera in the south. Every stop on this route is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and the whole loop is timed for Italy’s Giornate Europee del Patrimonio, the European Heritage Days of late September. Each stop links to its full entry in the archive; download the GPX or KML for your own navigator.
Get this route — explore at your own pace
The walk and the notes are open to everyone, right here. To take the route with you — the GPX and KML tracks for your phone — you need a CHO account, and a free one is enough. We do not sell these routes: we build them ourselves and give them to the people who read us.
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This route was built with the tools we give operators.
Guides, associations and cultural operators build their own routes here: pick the stops from the archive, add your notes, and the map, the GPX and the printable version come out on their own. Your programme gets a permanent page, your events go on the city pages people read while planning — and if you sell your route as a road-book or a virtual tour, you receive 80% of the price net of tax.
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Venice — Grand Canal
Venice's Grand Canal winds for nearly four kilometres past more than 170 historic palaces, crossed by the Rialto Bridge and worked daily by gondolas and vaporetti.
Centro Storico di Verona – Virtual Tour 360°
Verona's old town holds a working Roman amphitheatre, Scaligeri tombs, Sanmicheli's fortifications and Mantegna's altarpiece at San Zeno, all within a UNESCO-listed centre.
Basilica of San Vitale – Virtual Tour 360°
San Vitale is one of the most complete surviving examples of early Byzantine art in the West. The octagonal church was consecrated in 547, two years before…
Centro Storico di Firenze — Brunelleschi Cupola Uffizi Ponte Vecchio Palazzo Vecchio UNESCO 1982 – Virtual Tour 360°
The most complete surviving medieval and Renaissance city in Europe: Brunelleschi's dome, Giotto's Campanile, Ghiberti's Gates of Paradise, Palazzo Vecchio…
Pisa: Piazza dei Miracoli – Virtual Tour 360°
Cathedral, baptistery, leaning tower and cemetery in white marble on a single lawn: Pisa's Piazza dei Miracoli is Italy's densest gathering of Romanesque architecture.
Siena: Centro Storico
Siena's historic centre preserves the medieval republic almost intact, from the shell-shaped Piazza del Campo to Lorenzetti's civic frescoes and the striped marble Duomo.
Assisi, Basilica di San Francesco – Virtual Tour 360°
Two stacked churches in Assisi hold the tomb of Saint Francis and Giotto's fresco cycle, a turning point in the history of Italian painting.
Historic Centre of Rome – Virtual Tour 360°
The most visited heritage city in the world and the physical foundation of Western civilisation — Rome, the “Eternal City,” contains within a day’s walk the…
Naples: the Historic Centre – Virtual Tour 360°
Naples's historic centre keeps the Greek street grid of ancient Neapolis intact, its decumani and vicoli lined with churches, cloisters and presepe workshops layered across two and a half millennia.
Sassi di Matera
Two cave-cut districts carved into a limestone ravine, continuously inhabited from the Paleolithic to 1952 — one of the oldest living settlements in the…
Download for tour navigation
🔒 The walk and the notes are open to everyone on this page. The files to take with you — the stop list as a PDF, and the GPX and KML tracks for your phone — come with a CHO account, and the free one includes them.
Walk it with the navigator on
It opens in the Google Maps app with every stop already loaded, in the order we put them in. From there the route is yours: pick how you travel — on foot, by bike, by public transport or by car — change where you start and where you end, drag the stops into a different order, and add places of your own along the way.