Places Ian Engweiler Wants to Go

A madman's personal garden filled with 1,000 sculpted heads.

The giant skeleton sculpture is surprisingly well-traveled.

Also known as the Square Colosseum, this building is a prime example of fascist-era rationalist architecture.

This grisly effigy displays an early Christian martyr who was skinned alive and beheaded.

One of the world's oldest working clocks is curiously missing the Zodiac sign of Libra.

Two stone columns flank the grand Venice square, but there were supposed to be three.

A star-shaped fortress town fort built in the geometric model of the Renaissance utopian city.

This amazingly well-preserved villa just outside Pompeii boasts rare examples of ancient Roman paintings.

The world's oldest surviving anatomical theater, where "the dead are pleased to help the living."

The first Russian Orthodox church in the Catholic city of Rome in almost a thousand years.

Bell tower juts out from a village buried under a lake.

These delicate sand pyramids look like naturally occurring gothic spires.

This Italian dam is covered in salt-hungry goats who manage to scale its almost vertical face.

Charles Dickens was not a fan of the ghastly wall dressings in this 6th century church.

A stunning cemetery famous for its extraordinarily delicate & lifelike mourning sculptures.

Its interior is adorned with some of the best examples of early Christian mosaics.

St. Francesca Romana, patron saint of drivers, resides in the church she founded.

A slightly creepy gallery of plaster cast models in the same museum as Michelangelo's David.

The mummified relic of St. Catherine sits forever on a golden throne.

The walls and streets of the ancient city are peppered with penises.

Europe’s oldest natural human mummy.

Southern Italy's spinning top village.

A young Italian couple has been locked in an embrace for over 6,000 years.

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