Bologna

The pair stands side by side at the old crossroads. Since 2023 work has been going on to hold the leaning Garisenda up. Until that finishes the Asinelli next to it cannot be climbed either, so both are seen from the ground. The Asinelli has 498 steps inside.

Seven life-size terracotta figures stand around the body of Christ. It was made in the fifteenth century, and the grief in it is held without exaggeration, so it reads less as sculpture than as a scene stopped. You get in through a side door of the church.

The portico runs unbroken from town up to the hilltop sanctuary through six hundred and sixty-six arches. The climb is close to four kilometres with the last stretch steepest, and every arch is numbered, so you can count what is left. Rain never reaches you.

One side of the square is a run of steps, and people sit on them at any hour. The bronze Neptune beside it is large enough that its proportions were worked out to hold up from the angles people would actually see. On summer nights films are shown here.

Marble was laid only across the lower front and the brick above was never faced, so it stands unfinished. A brass line is set into the floor, and sunlight from an opening high in the roof travels along it to mark the day and the season. Inside it is very cool.

Not one church but several buildings from different centuries joined around a courtyard. An octagon modelled on the Holy Sepulchre stands at the centre, a stone basin they call Pilate's bowl sits in the inner yard, and it costs nothing to go in.

A stepped lecture room built of fir, with a marble dissecting table at the centre. Two flayed figures carved on the wall hold up the canopy, which startles most people on the way in. Bombing destroyed it in 1944, and the salvaged pieces were put back together.

The medieval trade lanes are still sorted the old way, one for fish and another for butchers. Stalls push out under the porticoes so passing means stepping around people, at midday it blocks with those standing for a glass, and most of it shuts on Sunday.

Open a small wooden shutter in a lane wall and a canal is running between the buildings behind it. Several waterways pass under this city and nearly all are covered over, so few places let you see water, and the line of people in front makes it easy to find.

Europe's oldest university in unbroken operation, and it still teaches from buildings in the centre. Walls and ceilings of the old headquarters carry thousands of graduates' family arms, and whole corridors are shields. In term you walk it among the students.

St Dominic lies buried here; he died in Bologna in 1221. Among the small figures around the marble shrine, the candle-bearing angel and two saints were carved by the young Michelangelo. Walk round behind the tomb to see them close up.

A gallery on a lane in the university district whose headline work is Raphael's Ecstasy of St Cecilia. Room after room of the Bolognese school follows, the Carracci and Guido Reni among them. Next to the Uffizi, visitors here can be counted on two hands.

The university's eighteenth-century science collections, displayed in an old palace's rooms. Exact wax anatomical models of the human body, and models made to teach childbirth, draw the most attention. Ship models and maps sit beneath frescoed ceilings.

A city 30 minutes by train from Bologna; its Romanesque cathedral, Ghirlandina tower and Piazza Grande are UNESCO-listed together. Tours visit balsamic ageing lofts. Wiligelmo, a twelfth-century sculptor, carved the Genesis reliefs on the cathedral facade.

Ravenna, over an hour from Bologna by rail, gathers Byzantine mosaics of the 5th and 6th centuries. Emperor Justinian and Empress Theodora in San Vitale and the starry blue vault over Galla Placidia's mausoleum lead the list. Dante is buried there too.

The museum in the town south of Modena where Ferrari has its headquarters, with racing cars and F1 winners lined up in a red row. A local bus runs there from Modena. Along the factory wall you hear cars on the test track.