Places daveschaaf Wants to Go

Italy's curious field of mud volcanoes is named for being both gross AND salty.

Geothermal waterfalls in Tuscany.

This quaint Italian town keeps losing ground as the sides of its plateau slowly erode.

This picturesque Umbrian city has a subterranean side that has long remained hidden.

Fountain where visitors can earn a license to be mad.

The world's largest "Christmas tree" is illuminated by hundreds of lights stretching 2,000 feet up the slope of Mount Ingino.

Stumbling upon this whimsical wooded garden is like stepping into an enchanted forest full of philosophical musings.

This 16th-century monastery has been turned into a surrealist architecture compound.

A unique Tuscan hideaway acts as an art mecca as well as a hotel.

An Italian hillside ghost town.

Geometry and mystery come together in an epic show of octagonal masonry.

A dead saint, a deadly poison, and a mysterious holy ooze.

People have been living in the cave houses on this Italian hillside since the Neolithic era.

A labyrinth of ancient tunnels hidden below the city holds the ruins of 2,500 years of history.

This Neapolitan exhibition hall grants weird and wonderful insight into the intricacies of human biology.

An eerie, little-known Neapolitan museum filled with preserved human remains.

An underground paleo-Christian burial site composed of the remains of several cemeteries and Basilicas.

The burial place of an obscure North African saint was turned into a macabre body preservation factory for the 17th-century Neapolitan elite.

The oldest volcanology research center in the world.

This medieval Italian town is a sheer (and beautiful) cliffside defense.

Rome's ancient Etruscan rival, now a park full of ruins.

Roman-era ships unearthed...

This Italian stadium makes liberal use of fascist statuary to evoke classical sporting arenas.

If you want to talk to the Pope you will have to stare down this surreal vision of Jesus rising from a nuclear hell.