Places to see in Italy

A French-looking Savoy residence on the Po, inside the riverside park that Turin actually uses — runners, rowers and families rather than visitors. The castle is a university faculty and mostly seen from outside; the park and the river walk are the reason to come. An easy hour on foot from the centre.

Corridors of some eight thousand mummified bodies, clothed and displayed upright, from the sixteenth century to the 1920s. Genuinely unsettling and not suitable for everyone or for young children — worth deciding before you are standing in it. An hour, and a short bus ride from the centre.

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.

The three rock stacks off the south coast that are the island's signature, one of them pierced by an arch boats pass through. Seen from the Tragara belvedere on a level walk out of Capri town, or from the water. The walk is free and takes about twenty minutes each way.

Michelangelo's David, and the unfinished Prisoners in the corridor leading to him, which many people end up preferring — half-carved figures still emerging from the block. A small museum built around one sculpture: an hour is plenty. Book ahead, and go early or late, because the room around David fills.

Making two kinds of pizza and nothing else since 1870 — marinara or margherita, marble tables, a ticket and a wait on the pavement. The argument about Naples' best pizzeria never ends, but this is where it starts.

The cathedral's free-standing bell tower, leaning since it was built because the ground beneath one side is soft. Climbing it is ticketed, timed and capped, and the tilt is genuinely disorienting on the stairs. Everything around it — cathedral, baptistery, walled cemetery — is on the same lawn and is the better half of the visit.

A cast-iron market hall from 1874 — butchers, cheese and tripe stalls on the ground floor in the morning, a food court upstairs until late. The ground floor is the real one.

Genoa's covered market since 1899, in a former convent cloister off Via XX Settembre — produce and fish downstairs, a food hall on the upper level. The city's basil, and therefore its pesto, passes through here.

Where the cathedral complex keeps the original sculpture taken indoors out of the weather, including Giovanni Pisano's carving. Quiet, small, and the place to understand what the buildings outside actually carry. An hour, and it has a cloister view of the tower most visitors never find.

Pouring wine since 1465 and serving no food at all — you bring your own from the market stalls in the alleys outside and buy the drink. Long shared tables, cash, and no concession to anything since.

The town hall on the Campo, holding Lorenzetti's Allegory of Good and Bad Government — a fourteenth-century fresco cycle about how to run a city, painted in the room where it was run. Unusually direct for medieval art and worth reading about beforehand. An hour.

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 protected islet itself, walked on a short marked path through Mediterranean planting with the bay on both sides. Separately ticketed from the beach below and takes about half an hour. Snorkelling off the rocks around it is the better half of the visit.

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.

One of the few opera houses whose name means something to people who never go to the opera. The museum and a look into a box are open by day; a performance is a different proposition and wants planning months out. The plain exterior surprises everyone who arrives expecting a monument.

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 oldest working opera house in Europe, older than La Scala, with a red and gold auditorium that daytime guided tours get you inside. A performance is the better experience where the dates allow. Next to the royal palace and the arcade, so it slots into a walk rather than needing a trip of its own.

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.

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.

Open since 1834 opposite the church it is named for, serving the street food Palermo is built on — pane con la milza, panelle, arancine — from a marble counter at the front.

Open since 1760 on Via Condotti, and the oldest café in Rome — red velvet, marble tables and two centuries of paintings. Standing at the bar costs a fraction of sitting in the rooms behind it.

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.

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 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.

The terrace across the river, up either a funicular or a stiff set of steps, looking straight down on the Roman theatre and the whole curve of the old city. Free, open, and the place to be half an hour before sunset. Ten minutes from the centre on foot plus the climb.

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.