Italien

Boasting a wealth of diversions, this huge area extends to Rome’s southern limits. Glorious ancient ruins lounge amid pea-green fields and towering umbrella pines along the cobbled Via Appia Antica, one of the world's oldest roads and pot-holed with subterranean catacombs dating to the dawn of Christianity. By contrast, post-industrial Ostiense blasts visitors straight back to the modern age with its edgy street art, superb local dining and heaving nightlife. Then there's EUR, an Orwellian quarter of wide boulevards and linear buildings.

Glass är lika italienskt som pasta och prosecco, men var kan man få tag på den absolut bästa "gelaton" av dem alla? På Il Cannolo Siciliano i Rom. I alla fall om man ska tro en ny omröstning som utnämnde glasserian till den bästa i Italien.

Despite being only a hop, skip and jump from the city’s major museums, most of this ancient part of Florence is far removed from the tourist maelstrom. The streets behind main sight Basilica di Santa Croce are home to plenty of locals, all of whom seem to be taking their neighbourhood’s reinvention as hipster central – epicentre of the city’s bar and club scene – with remarkable aplomb.

Como (aka Lario) is the most ‘James Bond’ of the Italian lakes, where shiny red Ferraris weave through narrow lakeside towns and neoclassical villas take on a whole new level of opulence. Parts of the 2006 Bond movie Casino Royale were filmed here and many of the fancy lakeside hotels have a 007 price tag.

Most visitors to the Veneto devote all their time to Venice, which is understandable – until you discover the rich variety of experiences that await just an hour or two away.

Flamboyant, guarded, feisty yet staunchly aristocratic, Palermo is a seething mass of contradictions. Pock-marked buildings, broken pavements and decrepit infrastructure reveal deep political and economic cracks, and yet all are easy to overlook when you enter a church full of luminously beautiful Byzantine mosaics, wander along a street of stately baroque palazzi (palaces) or eavesdrop on the genial banter between canny stall owners and bargain-hunting housewives at a street market. Palermo is a cryptic creature, a city where nefarious neglect and soul-stirring beauty have always linked arms, where preconceptions are concurrently affirmed and subverted, where light and shade stir impressions that bury deep under your skin.

Vill du leva la dolce vita på din semester till Rom? Checka in på något av dessa hotell!

Set amid some of the most dramatic coastal scenery on the planet, these five ingeniously constructed fishing villages can bolster the most jaded of spirits. A Unesco World Heritage Site since 1997, Cinque Terre isn't the undiscovered Eden it once was but, frankly, who cares? Sinuous paths traverse seemingly impregnable cliff sides, while a 19th-century railway line cut through a series of coastal tunnels ferries the footsore from village to village. Thankfully cars were banned over a decade ago.

Uppför dig och visa respekt för de som bor här. Eller riskera att bli bötfälld. Det är budet från Florens som infört nya regler för turister som besöker den historiska staden.

Palermo har rest sig och lämnat sitt dåliga rykte bakom sig. På gott och ont har staden blivit ett av världens trendigaste och häftigaste resmål.