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Every journey to Italy is always a 'tour artistique'
A trip to Italy is always a tour artistique. There are so many artistic treasures and of such quality that to describe Italy as an open-air art gallery in its own right is hardly an exaggeration. No other country in the world can vaunt the same treasures of culture and art as Italy. Indeed, half of the world's historic and artistic assets are within its boundaries (UNESCO).

Found almost everywhere and referring to every historical era, they are preserved and protected in hundreds of archaeological sites and over 3,000 museums scattered throughout the country. Tourists, visitors and academics alike may admire and study these remnants - large and small - of centuries gone by.

Theatres and other buildings date back to Greek and Roman times; whole cities, roads and districts once buried have today been returned to the light by patient and skilful excavations; temples, statues, coins, inscriptions, and objects of daily use.

In Italy an exceptionally rich store of memories await to remind us all of Europe's past. The imposing and often elegantly embellished Romanesque and Gothic cathedrals - built after the eleventh century - are found mainly in the Centre and North. The ancient religious architecture in the southern regions amounts instead to an enthralling crucible of Byzantine, Muslim and Norman elements. In all the regions, then, in every city and town we will find relics - from buildings to the personal affects - of a deeply rooted artistic tradition that is spread throughout Italy.

Renaissance art was the great cultural movement which began in Italy in the 15th century and which profoundly influenced the history of culture and European civilisation as a whole. The Renaissance culture placed man and the secular world again at the centre of the Universe after the marginal position Man was afforded with respect to the gods during the difficult centuries of the medieval period. Those who exemplified it and have become icons of culture itself are Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo Buonarroti, Masaccio, Botticelli, Piero della Francesca, Mantegna, Donatello, Raffaello, Antonello da Messina, Bramante, Correggio, Tintoretto, Giorgione - all artists, sculptors, painters or architects who have become known as the world's greatest exponents of artistic genius. Their works are the source of a constant attraction for tourists and academics alike, people who are curious to unveil something of the secrets of that art which, even if produced today, would result as an expression of the breathtaking creativity. For the arts and architecture, the Renaissance is synonymous with masterpieces, inventive genius and creativity. Philosophers like Giordano Bruno and Tommaso Campanella, scientists like Copernico and Galilei, scholars like Machiavelli, poets like Ariosto, musicians like Palestrina and Monteverdi: great men of the Renaissance who, with their modern vision of the world and society that was shared and supported by a rich and enterprising bourgeoisie, succeeded in radically changing forever the way of thinking, living and creating. The great Renaissance season left its magnificent marks everywhere in Italy, not only in the great cities like Florence, Rome, Venice, Milan and Naples but also in many other centres of Italy's regions. Paintings, statues, churches, buildings, palaces and fountains: a sparkling series of signs through which the visitor can ideally reconstruct a civilisation that really did change the world.