Halfway between the tourist meccas of Venice and Verona lies the elegant city of Vicenza, a UNESCO World Heritage Site which, remarkably, remains off the beaten path.

Vicenza has been home to many illustrious personalities, the architect Andrea Palladio – as in Palladian windows – being the most notable. Considered one of the world’s most influential architects, Palladio transformed Vicenza and the surrounding countryside into his architectural playground with 23 palaces and buildings in the city alone and 27 nearby country villas which served as weekend and summer homes for wealthy Venetians.

Palladio revered and helped revive ancient Roman architecture and it is this influence that helps give Vicenza its distinctive and noble character.

Vicenza’s Piazza dei Signori is one of Italy’s most beautiful squares, and the Basilica Palladiana, Palladio’s first civic commission in 1546, is its most central and stunning sight.

At the beginning of the Corso Palladio you’ll discover the Teatro Olimpico, Palladio’s last and most ambitious work. Inspired by the ancient open-air Roman theaters, it is utterly unique. Classical statues and ornamentation abound and the painted trompe l’oeil sky is breathtaking … as is the stage set, the oldest in the world, still in use today. Completed after Palladio’s death, the set represents the city of Thebes and the setting of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex which was the inaugural production of the theater in 1585.

Another exceptional destination, the Villa Valmarana, built 200 years after Palladio and lavishly decorated with frescoes by Italy’s leading 18^th century painter Gian Battista Tiepolo, is just a 20-minute walk from town along a quiet wooded path.

From there you can continue on another foot path which leads to you to Palladio’s most famous and majestic country villa: La Rotonda. Its sober classical exterior contrasts with its vibrant, dramatic interior. It feels more like a temple than a residence.

A short drive through the Veneto countryside brings you to perhaps my favorite of Palladio’s villas, the Villa Barbaro, with its charming and playful frescoes by Paolo Veronese.

Palladio’s works and seminal treatise The Four Books of Architecture have guided and inspired architects throughout Europe and in United States for centuries (e.g., St Paul’s Cathedral in London, our White House, Capitol Building and the Mall). In recognition of that influence, Palladio was proclaimed the Father of American Architecture by the 111^th Congress of the United States in 2010.

“To have seen Italy without having seen Sicily is not to have seen Italy at all,  for Sicily is the clue to everything.”

So wrote Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, after visiting the island in 1787. Just a little over 2X the size of LA County, Sicily really packs it in per square mile of wild landscapes, dramatic seascapes, an unrivaled cultural and culinary fritto misto that pre-dates Classical Greece that never fails to enchant the curious traveler.

My friend and colleague Allison Scola, Owner and Curator of Experience Sicily and the Cannoli Crawl recently created a marvelous blog titled 52 Reasons to Love Sicily – you’ll not want to miss one of them!
In the meantime, enjoy our 52 photo homage to this endlessly fascinating and magical island of myth and legend.

Not far from the fashionable harbor town of Porto Ercole on the Tuscan coast is the little known Giardino dei Tarocchi – The Tarot Garden – where, for an enchanting afternoon, you can experience a whimsical alternative reality. An enchanting modern sculpture garden beckons with a surrealist landscape of twenty-two vibrant, massive, fantastical, multicolored depictions of the Major Arcana depictions of the Major Arcana of the mystical and mythical Tarot cards

The garden is the public art masterwork born of the fertile imagination of self-taught French-American artist Niki de Saint Phalle. A vibrant celebration of feminism, the garden represents a beguiling fusion of pop, folk, outsider art and surrealism. A great lover of Italy, de Saint Phalle was granted the land to create her magical world after a chance encounter with Marcella Agnelli, sister of Fiat industrialist Gianni Agnelli. She began work in 1979 and the colossal project consumed nearly two decades of her life.

Fully immersed in personally designing and building the statues (most measuring between 39 and 49 feet tall), de Saint Phalle hand-painted and decorated each with ornately detailed mirrors, mosaics, multi-colored ceramics and Murano glass, creating a kaleidoscope of colors, textures and shapes. The garden’s largest sculpture is of the Empress, symbolizing the great mother archetype as voluptuous woman-sphinx. An enormous hollow shell, its interior served as de Saint Phalle’s home while she worked on the garden. One of the figure’s breasts housed a lavishly-embellished living, dining and kitchen area and the other, a bedroom and bath.

Throughout the project’s lifespan, the artist enlisted a group of skilled collaborators in her “garden of joy.” Chief among those was her husband, Jean Tinguely, whose mechanical skills helped motorize and breathe life into several of the garden’s features and monumental sculptures. But the overall phantasmagorical design could ultimately be the brainchild of only one supremely gifted individual.

In Giardino dei Tarocchi, a visitor can not only admire the art but interact with it, whether climbing the Tower or playing the Wheel of Fortune. Niki de Saint Phalle meant for her Eden-on-earth to be touched and enjoyed by adults and children alike with all their senses . . . an evocation of – but also a brief respite from – the lifelong game of chance that is the story of the tarot.