Places Airlie Wants to Go

A remarkable lifelong collection of antiques and art preserved in a historic Melbourne townhouse.

Tiny artwork tucked within glass letterboxes form this hidden gem of an art gallery.

Largest Buddha carved from gemstone-quality jade in the world, on a world tour through 2011.

The King is honored by an elaborate grotto on a continent he never visited.

A firefighting museum housed in a historic station whose Lookout Tower watches over Melbourne.

Children's author May Gibbs's beloved stories about the tiny, human-like "Gumnut Babies" are immortalized in bronze.

A friendly monster lurks outside the State Library Victoria.

This Franklinford, Australia site was once home to one of the remotest churches of its faith—in the fictional world of the Kcymaerxthaere.

A fiery crater has been burning in the Karakum Desert since 1971.

Thousands of lawn gnomes have infested this Australian roundabout.

An encyclopedic collection of mammal penises.

The smallest country in Australia is a principled little thing with a friendly emperor.

This Venice bookstore has resigned itself to constant flooding by keeping its books in bathtubs and boats.

Where Venice's gondolas go for a tune-up.

The only museum with its curator—and her pets—buried inside.

Museum devoted to the artificial language of Esperanto.

A small museum filled with over 1,000 clocks, and one particular clock calibrated to run until the year 9999.

A silly medieval mural preserved on the side of a Viennese house.

The crypt of the imposing Stephensdom holds royal intestines and thousands of skeletons.

A Jenga-style cylindrical tower of books that appears to go on forever.

Bullet holes in the church wall are a reminder of the violence that followed the assassination of a high-ranking Nazi officer.

What looks like a crashed Zeppelin is actually a bright, airy reading room perched atop a modern museum.

The risqué mixed-media sculptures are supposedly a metaphor for Czech politics.

The slender brass strip in Prague's Old Town Square was used to tell time from 1652 to 1918.