Over 50 exquisite hand-painted Renaissance maps decorate a Medici storage room.

This sword isn't waiting for a king to pull it out. It was placed there by a saint.

The last moments of the ill-fated Pompeiians, frozen forever in plaster.

Renaissance villa and gardens complete with a tormented colossus.

Thousands of well-dressed mummies below a monastery.

Pompeii's less famous neighbor is still revealing her secrets.

Millions of glowing microscopic organisms light up the waters of this luminous lagoon.

Nature took her revenge on the "Wickedest City in the World."

A 16th-century horror show built in a lovely Italian garden.

An Italian crevasse filled with abandoned buildings gives visitors a look at the world without humans.

Charnel house at the foot of Mount Sinai.

The massive cave church of Cairo's Zabbaleen community is one of the largest Christian churches in the Middle East.

Take respite inside this jaw-dropping church while climbing the volcano where Georgia's Prometheus was once chained.

The childhood home of Henry Jones Jr. is now an adventure-themed bed and breakfast.

The largest self-built castle in the U.S., six decades in the making.

An Alaska livestock farm devotes itself to harvesting wool from creatures that once ran with mammoths and sabertooth tigers.

Breathtakingly blue walls shimmer inside the "Glacier Behind the Town."

Space-age monument to an early 20th-century uprising.

The possible imprisonment of Vlad the Impaler here earned the medieval castle its nickname, "Dracula's Castle."

A giant portrait of an ancient king looms over the river.

This fairy-tale castle would make Dracula (who is said to have been imprisoned there) jealous.

Cretean quarry suggests real-life site for ancient Greek myth of the man-eating Minotaur in his labyrinth.

The hallucinogenic center of the ancient world.

This legendary city has been a tourist attraction for centuries.