A modest museum in the final home of Italian poet and father of modern Italian, Francesco Petrarca.

A sudden, striking cluster of hills south of Padua has been attracting visitors for centuries.

This Italian church is as beautiful as it is common, except for the real skulls decorating the many mannequins inside.

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

Something's missing between the arcades of the Palazzo della Ragione in "the city of the three withouts."

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

The oldest botanical garden in the world that technically isn't the oldest.

The incorrupt tongue of the patron saint of lost things is venerated in this basilica.

Stare out over the lagoon and beyond from this 10th-century campanile on the island where the city of Venice began.

The small peaceful island off the Venice tourist circuit is where the city began more than 1,500 years ago.

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

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

Hanging within this medieval church are the bones of a beast allegedly slain by a fourth-century saint.

Originally a leper colony, the island is now an Armenian monastery that's home to an incredible manuscript library and eclectic museum.

The oldest of Venice's plague quarantine stations, designed to keep the medieval city safe from disease.

Venice's island of the dead.

Venice's "Island of the Mad."

Thousand-year-old Viking runes adorn an ancient Greek lion at the entrance to the Venetian Arsenal.

As can be expected from a centuries-old church built in a canal city, the undercroft of this house of worship is beautifully flooded.

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

The marble facade hides a little-known medical museum with early surgical instruments and rare copies of canonical texts.

An extensive collection of reliquaries containing the bones of saints housed in the largest Catholic church in Venice.

This Roman statue is missing a limb from when the Venetians stole it from Constantinople during the Crusades.

Go inside to really appreciate this 500-year-old technological masterpiece.