Europe
Italy is a country in southern Europe. Its capital is Rome. Vatican City and San Marino border it but are separate states, and XTOUR keeps their places out of its Italy pages.
Destinations covered
12
Published guides
29
Region
Europe
Explore Italy
Discover cities, regions and experiences worth building a trip around, then go deeper with practical guides and local context.
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11 destinations
Bolzano (Bozen) is the capital of the autonomous province of South Tyrol. XTOUR maps places in the city itself, such as the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology, and does not count Dolomite lakes or peaks as part of the city.
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Florence (Firenze) is a city and comune in Tuscany. Italy's national tourism site calls it the Tuscan capital and says its historic centre, enclosed within the ancient medieval walls, has been a UNESCO World Heritage site since 1982.
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Genoa is the capital of Liguria and a former maritime republic on the Ligurian coast. XTOUR maps places in the city itself, such as the Palazzo Ducale, and does not count the Cinque Terre, a separate national park, as part of the city.
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Milan is an Italian city and the capital of Lombardy. XTOUR maps places in the city itself, such as the cathedral, the Last Supper museum, Sforza Castle and the Pinacoteca di Brera.
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Naples is the capital city of Campania, and Italy's national tourism site describes its historic centre as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. XTOUR maps the National Archaeological Museum inside the city and keeps Pompeii (in the comune of Pompei), Herculaneum (in Ercolano) and Mount Vesuvius as separate places rather than places in the city.
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Palermo is a comune in Sicily, Italy, the capital of the Sicilian Region and of the Metropolitan City of Palermo. Palermo Cathedral and the Cappella Palatina lie within the comune; Monreale, with its cathedral, is a separate comune.
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Pisa is a city and comune in Tuscany, Italy. According to the Comune di Pisa, its Piazza del Duomo, with the cathedral, baptistery, bell tower and Camposanto, has been on UNESCO's World Heritage List since 1987.
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Rome is the capital of Italy, in the Lazio region. Rome's tourism office says its historic centre within the Aurelian Walls is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and that the city hosts a foreign state, the enclave of Vatican City. The comune also takes in Ostia Antica, the excavated ancient port city near the mouth of the Tiber, while Tivoli, with Villa d'Este and Hadrian's Villa, is a separate comune.
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Siena is a city in Tuscany, Italy, and the capital of the province of Siena; Visit Siena, the Comune di Siena's tourism site, says its old town became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1995.
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Venice (Venezia) is the capital city of the Veneto region, built on islands in the Venetian Lagoon, with a historic centre of six sestieri; its municipality also takes in lagoon islands such as Murano and Burano.
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Verona is a city and comune on the Adige in the Veneto region of northern Italy; Italy's national tourism site says it has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2000. XTOUR maps places in the city itself, such as the Arena, the Castelvecchio Museum, the Basilica of San Zeno and the Roman Theatre, and does not count Lake Garda as part of the city.
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Plan better
Florence and Venice each have a museum called the Accademia, and only Florence's Galleria dell'Accademia holds Michelangelo's David. Venice's Gallerie dell'Accademia is a separate museum of Venetian painting; this explainer sets out what each holds and how to tell them apart.
Genoa's World Heritage site is a system of 42 aristocratic palaces on its sixteenth- and seventeenth-century 'new streets', 24 of them in private use and 18 in public use. This guide explains what the Rolli were, which palaces are open as museums all year, how the city's Strada Nuova museums work, and what changes during the Rolli Days.
Italian signs use duomo, cattedrale, basilica and chiesa for overlapping things, and one building can carry three of the names at once. This explainer gives each word's meaning from Treccani's dictionary and the Code of Canon Law, shows how Milan, Florence, Venice and Rome's Pantheon combine them, and explains why the word on the sign tells you less about a visit than the body that runs the building.
Italian food is organised around places, and Italy's protected food names write much of that into law: 331 agricultural products carry a DOP or IGP name, and four more are protected as traditional specialities. This guide explains what DOP, IGP and STG mean, why a city's name on a label is not the label's area, and how Naples, Bologna, Modena and Siena show up in the register.
XTOUR plans Italy around city bases rather than regions: Rome, Florence, Venice, Verona, Milan, Naples, Bologna, Palermo, Genoa, Bolzano, Pisa and Siena. This guide says what each base is for, which major sites are in a city and which are only reached from one, and where XTOUR's more detailed guides take over.
Pisa's bell tower began to lean while it was still being built, because the ground beneath it gave way. This explainer sets out what Tuscany's tourism site and the geotechnical engineers who wrote up the 1990 to 2001 rescue say about the cause and the cure, and where their accounts differ.
Milan's Duomo is one part of a monumental complex run by the Veneranda Fabbrica del Duomo, which also takes in the rooftop terraces, the archaeological area under the square and the Duomo Museum in Palazzo Reale. This guide separates those visits, sets out what the Fabbrica's own pages say about the terraces, tickets and rules, and names what XTOUR could not read.
Until 1957 Naples' state paintings and antiquities were shown in one museum; that year the paintings moved up to the Capodimonte palace and the old museum kept the antiquities. This guide explains which collection is where, what MANN's own pages say about closed galleries and tickets in autumn 2026, and what XTOUR could not read about Capodimonte.
The Palio di Siena is a bareback horse race of three laps round the Piazza del Campo, run by ten of the city's seventeen contrade on 2 July and 16 August and organised by the Comune di Siena. This explainer sets out how the contrade, the draw, the horses, the jockeys and the painted silk prize fit together, what the city's own pages say about watching it, and how far the race day moved in 2026.
Pisa's Piazza del Duomo holds four monuments and two museums, all run by one body, the Opera della Primaziale Pisana. This guide sets out what each one is and how the Opera's own pages say tickets work: a timed Tower ticket, a one-year ticket for the rest, and a free Cathedral pass, along with the places where those pages contradict each other.
The same eruption of Vesuvius buried Pompeii and Herculaneum in different ways, and that is why the two sites look so different today. This explainer sets out what the two archaeological parks and published research say about how each town was buried and what survived.
Pompeii and Herculaneum are two Roman towns buried by the same eruption, now run by two separate archaeological parks; Vesuvius is the volcano, and its crater path is run by a national park. None of the three is in Naples, and each operator publishes its own visiting rules.
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