France

Florence is a city scaled for walking and built for looking. Almost everywhere you turn, there is something that someone made with extraordinary care — a carved doorway, a fresco glimpsed through an open courtyard, a gilded altarpiece lit only by candles. The Renaissance didn't just happen here; it was argued over, commissioned, and funded in these very streets, and the results are still on display in the same buildings they were made for.

The Uffizi holds the canonical works — Botticelli's Primavera, Leonardo's early Annunciation — but the galleries that tend to stay with visitors longest are the quieter ones: the Bargello's sculpture halls, or the Museo dell'Opera del Duomo, where Michelangelo's unfinished Pietà stands in a room almost entirely alone. Book the Accademia well in advance if you want to see the David without a crowd pressing close behind you.

Beyond the art, Florence rewards the senses in other ways. The Mercato Centrale in San Lorenzo is among the finest food markets in Italy. The Oltrarno neighborhood, across the Ponte Vecchio, has the feel of an older city — leather workshops, independent bookshops, and restaurants where the ribollita is made the way it has always been made. Climb to Piazzale Michelangelo late in the afternoon, when the light falls across the terracotta roofline and the city arranges itself beneath you like a painting.