Italy

The Amalfi Coast is overcrowded between eleven and four. We build the day around that fact: a boat leaves at eight, the water is glass, and you arrive in Positano before the ferries. By the time the town fills, you are already high on the Path of the Gods with a guide who grew up in Bomerano.

Rome we treat as a library rather than a checklist. A morning in the Palatine with an archaeologist, a closed door opened at the Palazzo Massimo, then a table in Testaccio where the menu is spoken rather than printed. Our hotel is a sixteenth-century palazzo with eighteen rooms and a roof that faces the Pantheon.