Italy

Photo: Venice cafe

A Venice café provides sustenance for participants in the city's famed Carnival.

Photograph by Mariusz Smiejek, My Shot

Fashionable Milan and the mountainous north could hardly differ more from teeming Naples and the arid, insular south, where the boot's toe appears to nudge Sicily into the Mediterranean and a few grizzled Mafia dons still prevail. • In between, art in speechless abundance—Byzantine, pre-Renaissance, Renaissance—is everywhere. • As are food and wine, from sublime seafood to peerless pasta and pizza. • The Vatican regularly issues decrees on morals, yet only a small percentage of Italians regularly attend Mass. • The nation that gave us Machiavelli today offers a soap opera of politics, peopled by rogues and libertines.

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