Places Caroline Thrift Wants to Go

Designed by Gustave Eiffel before his famed tower.

Mountain where Jesus was first tempted by the Devil.

This cemetery features modernist statues as strange as its name.

These secluded and abandoned anti-aircraft defenses have become one the most scenic viewpoints in Barcelona.

This semi-secret storybook hedge maze is also the oldest garden in the city.

Artist James Turrell's ode to dawn and dusk on the campus of Rice University.

This hidden Art Nouveau courtyard is an opulent feast for the eyes.

The tomb of history's greatest potato promoter is surrounded by tubers.

In this Parisian garden's grotesque former life as a zoo it fed exotic animals to the bourgeois and put humans on exhibit.

Egyptian Revival movie palace abandoned for decades and restored in 2013.

France's national museum of scientific and industrial instruments.

Paris' fabled purveyor of exotic taxidermy and natural history curios.

Croatia's towering concrete blossom grows from the site of a World War II concentration camp.

The martyr's wax-enhanced skeletal remains lie preserved in a glass case in the Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome.

The final resting place of the poets Shelley and Keats.

The skull of the patron saint of lovers lies in the Basilica di Santa Maria in Cosmedin—maybe.

A master of trompe-l'oeil creates a stunning, tourist-fooling dome out of a flat ceiling.

Rome’s legendary peephole vista is also a former Crusader stronghold.

Architectureal fantasy quarter of Rome.

The crypts of Capuchin friars decorated with the bones of over 4,000 friars, including an entire "crypt of pelvises."

Original cabaret handbills, posters, and feline artwork are a purrfect highlight of the Museum of Montmartre.

Known as the "Dodo Manège," this carousel features a herd of animals that have disappeared—or may be gone soon.

The history of radiation is on safe display at the foot of a radiation science laboratory.

This modest marker near Notre Dame identifies the very center of Paris.