Places samhartley101 Wants to Go

Legacy of the earthquake that nearly wiped Lisbon off the face of the Earth.

This Industrial Age architectural and engineering gem helps visitors and residents alike traverse Lisbon, “The City of Seven Hills.”

This unreal Portuguese palace looks as though it's made from a pile of different castles.

The verdant mossy ruins of a Franciscan monastery lie in the remote Sintra hills awaiting exploration.

Dyed by iron oxide over centuries, these sandstone rocks rise thousands of feet into the sky.

This eccentrically decorated palace is replete with grottoes, fountains, tunnels, and caves.

A rather vulgar example of the transition from Latin to the Italian vernacular.

The mystic whose incorrupt corpse still attracts the faithful.

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

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

An enigmatic modern marker left next to a historic Roman site.

This delightful little museum is dedicated to only one thing: pasta.

More sculpture than building, this architecturally significant temple was built on the spot of Saint Peter's crucifixion.

The martyr's wax-enhanced skeletal remains lie preserved in a glass case in the Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome.

Installed in an act of one-upsmanship, the annual sundial in this church is also a symbolic victory for the Gregorian calendar.

One of several skulls claiming to belong to the beheaded St. John the Baptist is on display at this Roman church.

This former Roman Catholic Church still contains the embalmed hearts and organs of 22 popes.

A fairy tale castle in modern Rome.

At the crypt of St. Mary of Eulogies and the Dead you are left alone to ponder mortality among piles of skulls.

The underground sanctuary of a mysterious ancient cult.

Hundreds of lucky felines haunt the ruins where Caesar was murdered.

Brass cobblestones mark the places where individual Holocaust victims were taken from their homes.

A treasure trove of Renaissance-era funerary art in a Roman church built on top of Nero's grave.

A modern sliver of architecture in Roma.