Orvieto — Umbria · Italy →Photo: bluejayphoto / iStockAll destinations.
99 places carrying our editorial line — every one of them genuinely undertouristed, every one of them with a named editor and a real local voice.
Maniago
Italy's knife town since the 1400s: water-powered forges, a museum in an old cutlery factory, workshops still grinding steel — and a railway back to life.
Modena
A UNESCO Romanesque heart and the world capital of true balsamic. Read Modena slowly, as a city of patient craft rather than racetrack speed.
Potenza
The highest regional capital in Italy: a vertical Apennine city of escalators and lifts, with Musmeci's concrete bridge on the valley floor.
Mértola
A fortified spur where the Guadiana meets the Oeiras: Portugal's richest window onto Al-Andalus, with the country's only surviving medieval mosque.
São Brás de Alportel
Ten kilometres above the Algarve's busiest beaches, a plain working town that once corked half the world's wine — and still smells faintly of boiled bark.
Banská Štiavnica
A UNESCO silver-mining town in a collapsed volcano, with Europe's old mining university, a Baroque Calvary on the hill and a ring of man-made lakes.
Špania Dolina
A copper-mining village of 240 people above Banská Bystrica, where the miners' wives made bobbin lace — and the lace is still taught.
