Places NicholasManila Wants to Go

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

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

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

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

A submerged archeological park still holds the wonders of a Roman Sodom.

An Italian crevasse filled with abandoned buildings gives visitors a look at the world without humans.

An ancient quarry rediscovered by a dog and claimed by biblical kings, a German cult, and the Freemasons.

The most peaceful "country" in the Middle East.

Submerged ruins of a Neolithic coastal settlement, where houses, wells, graves and skeletons have been unearthed.

This daunting 1st century fortress was purportedly the site of one of the most dramatic revolts of the Jewish-Roman wars.

This modernist cinema has survived war and reconstruction to become a symbol of Lebanon’s revolutionary spirit.

A patchwork of ruins from various civilizations in one of the world's oldest continually inhabited cities.

The ruins of a monumental tower in the heart of Lebanese mountains still puzzle archeologists.

The largest hewn stone in history.

What is left of the pillar of Saint Simeon, the voluntary martyr who climbed the column to give his sermons, remaining perched there for thirty-seven years.

This ancient mountain monastery welcomes all manner of faith in an effort to keep Christians in Syria.

Amid the rubble of Aleppo's Old Quarter, part of a historic market has been restored and re-opened.

One of the oldest and largest castles in the world.

The Syrian headquarters of alleged hashish-smoking assassins.

A 1,500-year-old ghost settlement is slowly fading away.

One of the world's oldest olive trees, thought to be over 2,000 years old.

A tiny church on a man-made island in the Adriatic.

Former military fort and site of untold horrors during WWII, this island may become the Adriatic's next luxury resort.

On top of a resort town as old as the Bronze Age sits an incredible war memorial statue overlooking the beaches below.