Buckingham Palace

Leaning Tower of Pisa

The Leaning Tower of Pisa is the campanile, or freestanding bell tower, of the cathedral of the Italian city of Pisa. It is situated behind the cathedral and is the third oldest structure in Pisa's Piazza del Duomo (Cathedral Square) after the cathedral and the baptistry. Although intended to stand vertically, the tower began leaning to the southeast soon after the onset of construction in 1173 due to a poorly laid foundation and loose substrate that has allowed the foundation to shift direction. The tower presently leans to the southwest.

Ponte Vecchio

Westminster Abbey

Gallerie degli Uffizi

The Uffizi is one of the world's great museums, and the single best introduction to Renaissance painting, with works by Giotto, Masaccio, Paolo Uccello, Sandro Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Perugino, Michelangelo, Raphael Sanzio, Titian, Caravaggio, and the list goes on. The museum is deceptively small. What looks like a small stretch of gallery space can easily gobble up half a day -- many rooms suffer the fate of containing nothing but masterpieces.Know before you go that the Uffizi regularly shuts down rooms for crowd-control reasons -- especially in summer, when the bulk of the annual 1.5 million visitors stampedes the place. Of the more than 3,100 artworks in the museum's archives, only about 1,700 are on exhibit.The painting gallery is housed in the structure built to serve as the offices (uffizi is Florentine dialect for uffici, or "offices") of the Medici, commissioned by Cosimo I from Giorgio Vasari in 1560 -- perhaps his greatest architectural work. The painting gallery was started by Cosimo I as well and is now housed in the second-floor rooms that open off a long hall lined with ancient statues and frescoed with grotesques.Tips for Seeing the Uffizi -- If you have the time, make two trips to the museum. On your first, concentrate on the first dozen or so rooms and pop by the Greatest Hits of the 16th Century, with works by Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Raphael, and Titian. Return later for a brief recap and continue with the rest of the gallery.Be aware that the gift shop at the end of the galleries closes 20 minutes before the museum. You can visit it without reentering the museum at any time; if you plan to stay in the collections until closing, go down to the shop earlier during your visit and get the guards' attention before you pass through the exit turnstile, so they'll know you're just popping out to buy a few postcards and will recognize you when you ask to be let back in.

Duomo

For centuries, people have commented that Florence's cathedral is turned inside out, its exterior boasting Brunelleschi's famous dome, Giotto's bell tower, and a festive cladding of white, green, and pink marble, but its interior left spare, almost barren.By the late 13th century, Florence was feeling peevish: Its archrivals Siena and Pisa sported huge new Duomos filled with art while it was saddled with the tiny 5th- or 6th-century Santa Reparata as a cathedral. So, in 1296, the city hired Arnolfo di Cambio to design a new Duomo, and he began raising the facade and the first few bays before his death in 1302. Work continued under the auspices of the Wool Guild and architects Giotto di Bondone (who concentrated on the bell tower) and Francesco Talenti (who finished up to the drum of the dome and in the process greatly enlarged Arnolfo's original plan). The facade we see today is a neo-Gothic composite designed by Emilio de Fabris and built from 1871 to 1887 (for its story, see the Museo dell'Opera del Duomo).The Duomo's most distinctive feature is its enormous dome, which dominates the skyline and is a symbol of Florence itself. The raising of this dome, the largest in the world in its time, was no mean architectural feat, tackled admirably by Filippo Brunelleschi between 1420 and 1436. You can climb up between the two shells of the cupola for one of the classic panoramas across the city. At the base of the dome, just above the drum, Baccio d'Agnolo began adding a balcony in 1507. One of the eight sides was finished by 1515, when someone asked Michelangelo -- whose artistic opinion was by this time taken as cardinal law -- what he thought of it. The master reportedly scoffed, "It looks like a cricket cage." Work was immediately halted, and to this day the other seven sides remain rough brick.The Duomo was actually built around Santa Reparata so it could remain in business during construction. For more than 70 years, Florentines entered their old church through the freestanding facade of the new one, but in 1370 the original was torn down when the bulk of the Duomo -- except the dome -- was finished. Ever the fiscal conservatives, Florentines started clamoring to see some art as soon as the new facade's front door was completed in the early 1300s -- to be sure their investment would be more beautiful than rival cathedrals. Gaddo Gaddi was commissioned to mosaic an Enthronement of Mary in the lunette above the inside of the main door, and the people were satisfied. The stained-glass windows set in the facade were designed by Lorenzo Ghiberti, and Paolo Uccello, a painter obsessed by the newly developed perspective, frescoed the huge hora italica clock with its four heads of Prophets in 1443.At a right-aisle pier are steps leading down to the excavations of the old Santa Reparata. In 1972, a tomb slab inscribed with the name Filippo Brunelleschi was discovered there (visible through a gate). Unless you're interested in the remains of some ancient Roman houses and parts of the paleo-Christian mosaics from Santa Reparata's floor, the 3€ ($3.90) admission isn't worth it.Against the left-aisle wall are the only frescoes besides the dome in the Duomo. The earlier one to the right is the greenish Memorial to Sir John Hawkwood (1436), an English condottiere (mercenary commander) whose name the Florentines mangled to Giovanni Acuto when they hired him to rough up their enemies. Before he died, or so the story goes, the mercenary asked to have a bronze statue of himself riding his charger to be raised in his honor. Florence solemnly promised to do so, but, in typical tightwad style, after Hawkwood's death the city hired the master of perspective and illusion, Paolo Uccello, to paint an equestrian monument instead -- much cheaper than casting a statue in bronze. Andrea del Castagno copied this painting-as-equestrian-statue idea 20 years later when he frescoed a Memorial to Niccolò da Tolentino next to Uccello's work. Near the end of the left aisle is Domenico di Michelino's Dante Explaining the Divine Comedy (1465).In the back left corner of the sanctuary is the New Sacristy. Lorenzo de' Medici was attending Mass in the Duomo one April day in 1478 with his brother Giuliano when they were attacked in the infamous Pazzi Conspiracy. The conspirators, egged on by the pope and led by a member of the Pazzi family, old rivals of the Medici, fell on the brothers at the ringing of the sanctuary bell. Giuliano was murdered on the spot -- his body rent with 19 wounds -- but Lorenzo vaulted over the altar rail and sprinted for safety into the New Sacristy, slamming the bronze doors behind him. Those doors were cast from 1446 to 1467 by Luca della Robbia, his only significant work in the medium. Earlier, Luca had provided a lunette of the Resurrection (1442) in glazed terra cotta over the door, as well as the lunette Ascension over the south sacristy door. The interior of the New Sacristy is filled with beautifully inlaid wood cabinet doors.The frescoes on the interior of the dome were designed by Giorgio Vasari but painted mostly by his less-talented student Federico Zuccari by 1579. The frescoes were subjected to a thorough cleaning completed in 1996, which many people saw as a waste of restoration lire when so many more important works throughout the city were waiting to be salvaged. The scrubbing did, however, bring out Zuccari's only saving point -- his innovative color palette.

Trevi Fountain

There are people who dismiss and deride the fountain for representing what they deem the most garish, touristy dimension of Rome. These people are killjoys, and they probably didn?t have the good sense to see the fountain late at night, even though Anita Ekberg and Marcello Mastroianni pointed the way. That?s when you show up, thrillingly unsettled by the way the fountain suddenly appeared around the corner, in a cramped crossroads, without any kind of drum roll. It is lighted, and the light creates sparkles in all that cascading water, which you can hear, because the hordes are gone. Just don?t make like Ms. Ekberg in ?La Dolce Vita? and take a dip. It?s outlawed.

Neuschwanstein Castle

Neuschwanstein Castle, which King Ludwig II built on a rugged hill against a backdrop of picturesque mountain scenery, was prompted by the idea of rebuilding an existing ruin "in the authentic style of the old German knights' castles", as he wrote in a letter to Richard Wagner.

Palazzo Vecchio

Florence's imposing fortresslike town hall was built from 1299 to 1302 on the designs of Arnolfo di Cambio, Gothic master builder of the city. Arnolfo managed to make it solid and impregnable-looking yet still graceful, with thin-columned Gothic windows and two orders of crenellations -- square for the main rampart and swallow-tailed on the 94m- (308-ft.-) high bell tower.The palace was once home to the various Florentine republican governments (and today to the municipal government). Cosimo I and his ducal Medici family moved to the palazzo in 1540 and engaged in massive redecoration. Michelozzo's 1453 courtyard just through the door was left architecturally intact but frescoed by Vasari with scenes of Austrian cities to celebrate the 1565 marriage of Francesco de' Medici and Joanna of Austria. The grand staircase leads up to the Sala dei Cinquecento, named for the 500-man assembly that met here in the pre-Medici days of the Florentine Republic and site of the greatest fresco cycle that ever wasn't. Leonardo da Vinci was commissioned in 1503 to paint one long wall with a battle scene celebrating a famous Florentine victory. He was always trying new methods and materials and decided to mix wax into his pigments. Leonardo had finished painting part of the wall, but it wasn't drying fast enough, so he brought in braziers stoked with hot coals to try to hurry the process. As others watched in horror, the wax in the fresco melted under the intense heat and the colors ran down the walls to puddle on the floor. Michelangelo never even got past making the preparatory drawings for the fresco he was supposed to paint on the opposite wall -- Pope Julius II called him to Rome to paint the Sistine Chapel, and the master's sketches were destroyed by eager young artists who came to study them and took away scraps. Eventually, the bare walls were covered by Vasari and assistants from 1563 to 1565 with blatantly subservient frescoes exalting Cosimo I de' Medici and his dynasty.Off the corner of the room (to the right as you enter) is the Studiolo di Francesco I, a claustrophobic study in which Cosimo's eldest son and heir performed his alchemy and science experiments and where baroque paintings hide secret cupboards. Against the wall of the Sala dei Cinquecento, opposite the door you enter, is Michelangelo's statue of Victory, carved from 1533 to 1534 for the Julius II tomb but later donated to the Medici. Its extreme torsion -- the way the body twists and spirals upward -- was to be a great influence on the Mannerist movement.The first series of rooms on the second floor is the Quartiere degli Elementi, again frescoed by Vasari. The Terrazza di Saturno, in the corner, has a view over the Uffizi to the hills across the Arno. Crossing the balcony overlooking the Sala dei Cinquecento, you enter the Apartments of Eleonora di Toledo, decorated for Cosimo's Spanish wife. Her small private chapel is a masterpiece of mid-16th-century painting by Bronzino. Farther on, under the sculpted ceiling of the Sala dei Gigli, are Domenico Ghirlandaio's fresco of St. Zenobius Enthroned with ancient Roman heroes and Donatello's original Judith and Holofernes bronze (1455), one of his last works.During the summer evening hours, the following sections, normally closed, are open: the Loeser Collections, with paintings by Pietro Lorenzetti and Bronzino and sculptures by Tino di Camaino and Jacopo Sansovino, and, perhaps more fun, the outdoor Balustrade running around the roof behind the crenellations -- it offers a unique panorama of the city and the piazza below.