Eat white truffle in Alba

Italy's elegant first capital — arcaded boulevards, the Egyptian Museum, and the home of vermouth and gianduja

Summit Gran Paradiso, 4,061 m — the only 4,000er entirely inside Italy and a classic first big peak

Ferry between baroque palace-gardens and a fishing-village island on a serene pre-Alpine lake

Sip the "king of wines" among the UNESCO vineyard hills of Piedmont, ideally in white-truffle season

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