Italien

In a city of extraordinary beauty, Rome’s ancient heart stands out. It’s here you’ll find the great icons of the city’s past: the Colosseum, the Palatino, the forums and the Campidoglio (Capitoline Hill), the historic home of the Capitoline Museums. Touristy by day, it’s quiet at night with few after-hours attractions.

Fusing haughty elegance with down-to-earth grit in one beautifully colonnaded medieval grid, Bologna is a city of two intriguing halves. One side is a hard-working, high-tech city located in the super-rich Po valley where suave opera-goers waltz out of regal theatres and into some of the nation's finest restaurants. The other is a bolshie, politically edgy city that hosts the world's oldest university and is famous for its graffiti-embellished piazzas filled with mildly inebriated students swapping Gothic fashion tips.

Historiskt och kulinariskt omtumlande. Luggsliten och bedagad som få, men också fascinerande som ingen annan. Vi äter oss fram i Roms mest spännande stadsdel – Testaccio.

Italien har ingen brist på cykelvägar med undersköna vyer – men kommande Ciclabile di Limone sul Garda spås bli något i en klass för sig. Den 140 kilometer långa sträckan kommer att gå runt hela Gardasjön och har redan titulerats "Europas mest spektakulära cykelbana".

Sicily's wild and empty interior is a beautiful, uncompromising land; a timeless landscape of silent, sunburnt peaks, grey stone villages and forgotten valleys. Traditions live on and life is lived at a gentle, rural pace. It's an area that encourages simple pleasures – long lunches of earthy country food, meanders through hilltop towns, quiet contemplation over undulating vistas. It’s also an area of surprising natural diversity – one minute you’re driving through rolling hills reminiscent of Tuscany, the next through pockets of eucalypt bush akin to Australia.

Naples is raw, high-octane energy, a place of soul-stirring art and panoramas, spontaneous conversations and unexpected, inimitable elegance – welcome to Italy's most unlikely masterpiece.

With a pristine medieval centre and an international student population, Perugia is Umbria’s largest and most cosmopolitan city. Its centro storico (historic centre), seemingly little changed in more than 400 years, rises in a helter-skelter of cobbled alleys, arched stairways and piazzas framed by solemn churches and magnificent Gothic palazzi (mansions). Reminders of its lively and often bloody past are everywhere, from ancient arches and medieval basilicas to Renaissance frescoes by the likes of Perugino and Raphael.

The coastal stretch between Palermo and Milazzo is packed with dramatic beach and mountain scenery, and appealing coastal towns like Cefalù and Castel di Tusa – but once summer rolls around, it's holiday central, characterised by crowded roads and beaches. Somehow neither this, nor the ever-growing proliferation of concrete buildings marring the coastline, can dissuade locals from coming here for their annual vacation and having a whale of a time.

Älskar du Venedigs kanaler och vackra hus, men är trött på massturismen? Då ska du resa till den mindre välkända grannstaden Treviso.

Capri är precis så fantastiskt man kan tänka sig. Vagabonds Åsa Johansson som bor i Italien, listar åtta favoriter som du inte får missa när du besöker den mytomspunna ön!