Attraction in Italy

The cave districts cut into the ravine, lived in continuously for millennia, cleared by the state in the 1950s as a national disgrace and now a world heritage site full of hotels. Walking them is the visit — steep, stepped, and best done twice, once by day and once after dark when the whole bowl is lit.

A terraced villa on a wooded promontory, reachable by boat or a woodland walk, with loggias framing the lake in three directions. The most photographed garden on Como and deservedly so. Numbers are managed and the garden and house are ticketed separately. Half a day with the crossing.

The largest aquarium in Italy, on the restored old harbour, and the one thing in Genoa that everyone with children ends up doing. Two to three hours and busy at weekends. The harbour around it — Renzo Piano's rebuild of the waterfront — is worth the walk on its own.

The lake's only island, small, wooded and scattered with the ruins of a town destroyed in the twelfth century and never rebuilt. A short boat hop, an hour to walk, and a very different register from the villa circuit. Boats are seasonal.

An estate above Greve with formal Italian gardens behind the house and vines below them, producing wine since the fourteenth century. Visits are by arrangement rather than drop-in, which keeps it calm. Worth calling ahead for.

A fortified estate above Greve with vineyards falling away on three sides — one of the cluster of castle wineries on the northern stretch of the Chiantigiana that take visitors. Closer to Florence than Brolio, which makes it the practical choice on a day trip rather than a stay.

A sea cave lit from below through an underwater opening, which turns the whole interior a strong blue. Entered lying flat in a rowing boat through a gap barely a metre high, so it closes whenever the sea is up — and it often is. Short, expensive and genuinely unlike anything else.

A garden at the edge of Ravello ending in the Terrace of Infinity — a balustrade lined with marble busts, four hundred metres straight above the sea and nothing in front of it. The single best view on this coast. Ticketed, and worth arriving for opening before the coaches reach Ravello.

An English-style garden along the water at Bellagio, flatter and calmer than the other two and walkable straight from the village. Plane trees, a Japanese garden and a chapel. An hour, and the least crowded of Como's three famous gardens.

A former fishing village swallowed by the city, still a pebble cove ringed by ochre houses, twenty minutes east along the seafront promenade. Genoese come here for ice cream at sunset. The walk out along Corso Italia is half the point.

Verona's largest square, and the Roman arena stands on it — a first-century amphitheatre still in use, which in summer means opera performed to fifteen thousand people under the open sky. Cushion hire and a cheap stone step are part of the experience. By day the arena can be walked into; by night the square is where the city eats.

The largest opera house in Italy, closed for twenty-three years and reopened in 1997, with guided tours by day when nothing is being staged. The steps outside are where the last scene of The Godfather Part III was filmed, which is why people photograph them.

The other Ravello garden, on the main square, with a Moorish cloister and terraces that stage the summer music festival on a platform hanging over the drop. Smaller than Cimbrone and easier to fit in. Wagner wrote that he found Klingsor's garden here.

The old seat of Europe's oldest university, its walls and ceilings covered in the painted coats of arms of centuries of students. The anatomical theatre upstairs is carved entirely in spruce, with two skinned figures holding up the canopy. Small, cheap and genuinely singular. Forty minutes.

The small chapel on a rise between San Quirico and Pienza that appears in most photographs of this landscape, with its cypress pair and nothing else for a mile. Seen from the road or reached by a farm track on foot. Sunrise and the hour before sunset are when people come.

A shell-shaped square sloping to the town hall, divided into nine paved segments, and the finest public space in Italy by a fair margin. People sit on the brick and stay for an hour. Twice each summer it is packed earth and the Palio is run around its edge in about ninety seconds.

A small baroque square behind the palace, framed by the brick curve of Palazzo Carignano where the first Italian parliament sat. The arcaded streets around it are the point of Turin — kilometres of covered pavement, and the historic cafés that invented the city's chocolate habit are on them.

The centre of Bologna and the room the whole city passes through — town hall on one side, the unfinished basilica on another, and people sitting on the steps at every hour. Free, open and the natural place to start. The covered market streets run off its eastern corner.

Built on the footprint of a Roman stadium, which is why it is a long oval rather than a square, with Bernini's Four Rivers fountain in the middle. The cafés on it charge for the position; the streets one block west do not. Best in the evening, and the natural place to end a walk through the old centre.

Sorrento's centre and the hinge of the whole town — the road down to the marina drops off one side, the old lanes run off the other, and everyone passes through it in the evening. Cafés on the square charge for the position. The point of Sorrento is that it is a base, and this is where the base begins.

The only piazza in Venice — everything else is a campo — and the lowest point in the city, which is why it floods first. Ringed by cafés with orchestras and prices to match. Best at seven in the morning before the day boats arrive, and after ten at night when they have gone.

Pisa's other square, five minutes from the tower and almost empty by comparison — Vasari's sgraffito facades and the university that Galileo attended. The reminder that Pisa is a working city with a life beyond one lawn. Ten minutes, on the walk between the tower and the river.

Florence's civic square, open-air sculpture gallery and the front door of the Palazzo Vecchio. The Loggia dei Lanzi on one side holds real Renaissance sculpture that anyone can walk up to for free, including Cellini's Perseus. Crossed constantly; worth ten minutes standing still.

Naples' great civic space, a colonnaded curve facing the royal palace, and one of the few places in the old city with room to breathe. No traffic, concerts in summer, and the point where the tight streets of the centre finally open onto the bay. Ten minutes, usually on the way to something else.

The medieval bridge lined with goldsmiths' shops, the only one in Florence the retreating army left standing in 1944. Crossed rather than visited — five minutes on it, and the better photographs are from the next bridge downstream at either end of the day. The Vasari Corridor runs above the shops.

The oldest bridge over the Grand Canal, and the busiest place in Venice at midday. The view along the canal from the top is the reason to push through. The market on the far side, in the morning, is the better half of the visit — fish, vegetables and locals actually shopping.

A baroque waterfall wedged into a small square, and far bigger in person than photographs suggest. Crowded from mid-morning until late; genuinely worth seeing at seven in the morning or after midnight, when it is lit and nearly empty. A ten-minute stop rather than a destination, and on the walk between the Pantheon and the Spanish Steps.

The enclosed white bridge between the Doge's Palace and the prisons, seen from the waterfront bridge beside it, where a permanent scrum of people photograph it. Five minutes from outside; the inside is part of the palace visit, and the view out through its stone lattice is deliberately almost nothing.

A medieval house with a balcony added in the twentieth century to satisfy visitors, in a courtyard whose walls are covered in graffiti and chewing gum. Included here because everyone asks and it is thirty seconds off the main street — but it is a photograph rather than a visit, and the paid interior adds little.