Church in Italy

A hilltop sanctuary reached by the longest covered walkway in the world — nearly four kilometres of portico and six hundred arches, climbing steadily out of the city. The walk is the attraction and takes about an hour up. Views over the Apennines at the top. Buses exist for the way down.

Fourteen baroque chapels climbing a hillside path through olive terraces to a sanctuary, with the lake below the whole way. A world heritage site, free, and almost never busy. About an hour up at a walking pace, and the view back down is the reward.

Six hundred years in the building and carrying more statues than any other church in the world. The interior is free and surprisingly dim; the reason to buy a ticket is the roof, where you walk among the spires and buttresses with the Alps visible on a clear day. Lifts and stairs are priced separately. Shoulders and knees must be covered.

The largest church in the world, and the reason most itineraries give the Vatican a morning of its own. Free to enter with a long security queue; the dome climb is separate, paid, and gives the definitive view over the square and the city. Shoulders and knees must be covered — enforced at the door, without exception, in any weather.

A twelfth-century abbey alone in a valley of olives below Montalcino, built in pale travertine that turns gold late in the day. Almost nothing around it, which is the point. Free, and if the hours align the monastic chant in the nave is worth arranging a day around.

Florence's cathedral, and Brunelleschi's dome is the reason the city looks the way it does from every hill around it. The nave is free and surprisingly bare; the dome climb is ticketed, steep, 463 steps with no lift, and books out days ahead. Cover shoulders and knees. The complex ticket also covers the baptistery and the campanile.

Byzantine rather than Italian in feel, and the interior is eight thousand square metres of gold mosaic — go on a bright day, when the light through the upper windows sets the whole ceiling alight. Short free visits, paid skip-the-line slots, and separate tickets for the Pala d'Oro and the loggia with the bronze horses. Large bags are refused at the door.

A huge brick Gothic church in San Polo holding Titian's Assumption above the high altar — painted for this building, still in it, and worth the crossing on its own. Also Titian's tomb, and a Bellini triptych in the sacristy. Calm, and a useful anchor for a walk away from San Marco.

One of the finest Romanesque churches in Italy, twenty minutes' walk west of the centre and largely missed because of it. Bronze door panels from the eleventh century, a Mantegna altarpiece, and a crypt where Shakespeare set the marriage. Calm even when the rest of Verona is not.

Not one church but a linked complex of several, built and rebuilt from late antiquity onward around a courtyard — locally called the seven churches, though the count has changed over the centuries. Free, quiet, and the most atmospheric half hour in the city. On a sloping square with cafés along one side.

Milan's oldest church, largely eleventh-century, and the model for Romanesque building across Lombardy — a colonnaded atrium, two mismatched towers, almost no decoration. Free, calm, and a complete change of register from the cathedral. Worth the twenty-minute walk out from the centre.

The Dominican convent whose refectory wall carries Leonardo's Last Supper. The painting is a separate, strictly timed visit — a quarter of an hour, a couple of dozen people, and slots that go weeks ahead, which is the single most common booking mistake on a Milan trip. The church itself is free and quiet.

Reached up a wide flight of sixty-odd steps from the square, with a striped Arab-Norman front that says plainly which sea Amalfi traded on. The Cloister of Paradise beside it is the part worth the ticket. Half an hour, and the centre of the only town on this coast with a flat piazza.

A rock church driven into the spur that stands in the middle of the Sassi, with Byzantine frescoes inside and the best view over both districts from the terrace outside. Small, ticketed, and the clearest single explanation of how this place was built.

Monopoli's cathedral, baroque and much larger than the town around it suggests, a few streets back from a working fishing harbour. Free. Monopoli is the least self-conscious of the coastal towns here and the easiest to spend an evening in.

Enormous, and famously unfinished — the marble facing stops halfway up the front and simply becomes brick. Inside is a meridian line laid into the floor in 1655, still accurate, with a hole in the roof that puts a disc of sun on it at noon. Free, and a much stranger building than it first appears.

The domed church at the mouth of the Grand Canal, built as a thank-offering after the plague of 1630, and the shape that closes every photograph taken from the Accademia bridge. Free to enter, rarely busy, with Titians in the sacristy. Ten minutes by vaporetto or a walk through Dorsoduro.

Striped black and white in the Ligurian manner, at the heart of the old town's alleyways. An unexploded naval shell from 1941 still sits inside where it landed. Free, central, and the natural pause in a walk through the carruggi around it.

The largest baptistery in Italy, round and domed, and famous for an acoustic that custodians demonstrate by singing a note and letting it hang in the air for seconds. Worth timing your visit to catch one. On the same ticket as the rest of the cathedral complex.

A blank, pyramid-studded stone front — left over from the palace it used to be — hiding an interior of near-total baroque saturation. The contrast is the whole point and it registers in about a second. On Spaccanapoli, opposite Santa Chiara's tiled cloister.

A plain white front on Ravello's square hiding two carved mosaic pulpits, one supported on lions, that are among the finest twelfth-century work in the south. Free to enter the nave, small charge for the museum in the crypt. Ten minutes, between the two gardens.

The octagonal building facing the cathedral, older than it, with a ceiling of gold mosaics that most people miss because they are looking at the doors. Ghiberti's bronze Gates of Paradise on the east side are replicas; the originals are in the cathedral museum opposite. Twenty minutes, covered by the Duomo complex ticket.

A Roman temple that has been in continuous use for nearly two thousand years, with the largest unreinforced concrete dome ever built and a nine-metre hole open to the sky. Ten minutes inside is enough to be worth the trip, which makes it the easiest thing in Rome to fit into a day. Rain falls through the oculus onto a sloped, drained floor.

A Romanesque country church just south of Panzano, with a portico, a quiet churchyard and cypresses. Free, usually empty, and five minutes off the main road. The kind of stop that makes a driving day feel like Tuscany rather than a series of tasting rooms.