The plague quarantine island home to the alleged "Vampire of Venice."

This palatial spiral staircase was so unusual the name "snail" was given to the noble family who built it.

This community on a small Venetian island has taken to painting their houses in bright neon hues.

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

The oldest operating pharmacy in the world features 800-year-old recipes.

The yawning maw of this pagan visage is said to bite off the hands of liars.

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

San Francisco's oldest surviving monument and meeting place for 1906 survivors.

A shop full of natural curiosities, carnivorous plants, and costumed taxidermied mice.

An essential stop before plundering, BYO Cutlass.

Furniture tries to escape an abandoned building in San Francisco.

A mysterious painting of the self-declared Emperor of the United States watches over a local hof-brau.

From the sky, a kaleidoscope of color brightens the grey landscape of the San Francisco Bay.

The one-time watch house for incoming ships at the Golden Gate now stands abandoned and hidden in trees.

A 300-ship graveyard, with a few still visible at low tide.

A modest reminder of treacherous waters at the Golden Gate.

San Francisco's urban bison herd has persisted in the face of extinction, development, and disease.

Staircase winds down the side of Telegraph Hill through gardens, wild parrots flying overhead.

Home to the largest urban bat colony in North America, estimated at 1.5 million bats.

The first American department store, and home to the largest operating musical instrument in the world.

The last moments of the ill-fated Pompeiians, frozen forever in plaster.

The glowing blue Nymphaeum of Emperor Tiberius.

2300-year-old Roman road connecting the empire.

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