Perched on one of the highest hills overlooking Florence, the basilica of San Miniato al Monte is one of the finest examples of Tuscan Romanesque architecture in Italy and one of the most beautiful churches in the city. Begun in 1013, it was built on the spot where, according to tradition, the early Christian martyr Saint Miniato was buried after his execution in the third century. The facade is the building most famous feature, a precise composition in white Carrara marble and green serpentine.....

Home of Michelangelo David, the Galleria dell Accademia in Florence is among the most visited art museums in Italy, a relatively small institution whose extraordinary holdings of late medieval and Renaissance Florentine art make it a fixture on every visitor itinerary. The museum opened in 1784 by order of Grand Duke Pietro Leopoldo, to provide a study collection for the students of the adjacent academy of fine arts. Michelangelo five-metre marble of David, carved between 1501 and 1504 and move.....

On the western edge of Milan, a short drive from the centre, Acquatica Park is a summer water park that has been a favourite escape from the heat for residents of the city for more than thirty years. Eighteen attractions are spread across landscaped grounds, with slides, pools and shaded lawns laid out around two main areas geared respectively to young children and to thrill-seekers. The largest pool, the Aztec Lagoon, has a rocky waterfall feature and shallow areas suited to relaxed bathing, w.....

Towering in dazzling white marble at the foot of the Capitoline Hill in Rome, the Vittoriano, known officially as the Altare della Patria or Altar of the Fatherland, dominates the open space of Piazza Venezia. The monument was begun in 1885 and inaugurated in 1911 to mark the first king of a united Italy, Victor Emmanuel II, and the unification of the country fifty years earlier. Designed by Giuseppe Sacconi after a competition won in the early 1880s, the building was meant to symbolise the new.....

Aqua World is the water-park wing of the Cinecitta World theme park on the southern outskirts of Rome, sharing its site with the larger film-themed amusement complex and included in most tickets to its bigger neighbour. The water park covers around twenty thousand square metres and operates as a seasonal summer attraction during the hotter months. The centrepiece is the Cinepiscina, a 1,700-square-metre cinematic pool with a giant screen mounted at one end that shows film clips, sporting events.....

Designed by the Italian architect Renzo Piano as part of the regeneration of the old port for the 1992 Columbus celebrations, the Aquarium of Genoa is the largest aquarium in Italy and one of the largest in Europe, displaying more than fifteen thousand animals from around six hundred species in seventy tanks spread across a long pier-built complex on the waterfront. The aquarium sits on a pier that juts out into the old port, with the main building shaped like a moored ship and a separate float.....

Founded in 1872 in the gardens of the Villa Comunale beside the seafront of Naples, the Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn is the oldest scientific aquarium in the world and one of the most important marine research institutions in the Mediterranean. The aquarium open to the public is the publicly visible front of a much larger research operation that has shaped marine biology for more than a century and a half. The institution was founded by the German zoologist Anton Dohrn, who believed that the .....

Built to shelter one of the great masterpieces of Roman sculpture, the Ara Pacis Museum stands on the bank of the Tiber in central Rome, housing the reassembled altar of the Augustan peace within a sleek modern building of white travertine, glass and steel. The museum was designed by the American architect Richard Meier and opened in 2006, the first significant new public building in the historic centre of Rome in decades. The altar itself, commissioned by the Roman Senate in 13 BC and dedicate.....

Standing between the Colosseum and the Forum, the Arch of Constantine is the largest surviving triumphal arch in Rome and one of the finest in the Roman world. Erected by the Senate in 315 AD to mark the tenth anniversary of Constantine accession and his victory over Maxentius at the Milvian Bridge three years earlier, the arch is more than twenty metres high and almost twenty-six metres wide. The triple-arched form, with a large central bay flanked by two smaller ones, was a Roman standard, bu.....

Set on the highest point of the Sacred Way as it climbs out of the Roman Forum toward the Palatine Hill, the Arch of Titus is the oldest surviving honorific arch in Rome. Erected in 81 AD by the emperor Domitian to commemorate his recently deceased older brother Titus and the suppression of the Jewish revolt in 70 AD, the arch is single-bayed and decorated with some of the finest sculptural reliefs to survive from the early empire. The two great panels on the inner walls of the arch are the mos.....