This ultra-modern burial building would have stacked the dead like a giant filing cabinet.

A treasure trove of Renaissance-era funerary art in a Roman church built on top of Nero's grave.

The marble facade hides a little-known medical museum with early surgical instruments and rare copies of canonical texts.

The Neapolitan Cult of the Dead still cares for the skulls at this mini-Fontanelle.

The bones of some 7,000 soldiers killed in the historic Battle of Solferino are stored here.

A tree that defies gravity grows in an ancient ruin.

This Arabesque Italian castle was built with a primitive, if ingenious, air-conditioning system.

The 1,000-year-old abbey is the birthplace of modern musical notation.

A beautifully well-preserved ancient Roman villa.

An exclusive waiting room built for the royal family in the 1920s is hidden in Milan’s central station.

This Italian church is as beautiful as it is common, except for the real skulls decorating the many mannequins inside.

A diverse collection of wax, bone, papier-maché and mummified relics.

A medieval fresco which reminds visitors that death will come for us all.

Every inch of this chapel is covered in craftsmanship from across the world.

A dilapidated psychiatric facility on the outskirts of Milan where electroconvulsive therapy was developed and Napoleon once lived.

Now an entertainment complex, the Lingotto building was once an avant-garde auto factory with a test track on the roof.

An extensive collection of reliquaries containing the bones of saints housed in the largest Catholic church in Venice.

During World War II, this rice mill became a Nazi concentration camp.

One of Catholicism's four major basilicas has a series of papal portraits that are said to predict the end of the world.

A medieval fountain lined with 99 unique stone faces whose origins and meaning remain unknown.

This former fascist summer camp was abandoned for decades.

The mystic whose incorrupt corpse still attracts the faithful.

A line of abandoned, alien-like fortresses dot the mountains of North Italy.

Da Vinci's equestrian statue, 500 years in the making.