Visit Perugia

St Francis's pink-stone hill town, crowned by a basilica frescoed by Giotto

Bite a sandwich of herb-roasted whole suckling pig, crackling and all, from a market van

Three thousand years of art, twenty regions of cooking, and a coastline that never quits — Italy is Europe's greatest hits

A city built on water with no cars — gondolas, Byzantine mosaics, and getting happily lost in the back canals

The 50,000-seat amphitheatre where Rome staged its bloodiest spectacles for 2,000 years

Eat properly handmade pasta — egg-rich tagliatelle in the north, bronze-cut durum in the south

Bite into the original — a 60-second wood-fired margherita in the city that invented pizza

Climb 251 spiralling steps up the world's most famous architectural mistake — tilting since 1173