Italy can overwhelm with choice, so most first trips focus on a handful of legendary cities. Rome delivers ancient ruins and the Vatican; Florence is the open-air gallery of the Renaissance; Venice floats on its lagoon like nowhere else on earth.
Add Milan for fashion and design, Naples for raw energy and the best pizza, and Verona for romance. Further south, the baroque towns of Sicily and the cliffside villages of the Amalfi Coast reward those with more time.
The joy of Italy is that every region feels like a different country, with its own dialect, cuisine and character. Pick three or four places, travel between them by fast train, and leave time simply to sit in a piazza.