Milan

Milan doesn't do quaint. The Duomo rises from Piazza del Duomo in a forest of marble spires and saints, the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II next door is a glass-roofed shopping arcade built like a 19th-century cathedral to commerce, and La Scala has been the temple of Italian opera since 1778. A free walking tour is the fastest way to see how a city bombed flat in 1943 rebuilt itself into one of Europe's wealthiest capitals.

Beyond the obvious postcard, Milan rewards a second walk: the Leonardo da Vinci trail past Santa Maria delle Grazie, the cobbled galleries of Brera, and the glass towers of Porta Nuova, where a pair of apartment blocks called the Bosco Verticale grow an actual forest on their balconies. Save the evening for the Navigli canals, where aperitivo hour turns the waterside into one long open-air living room.