A fossil of a 30 million-year-old fish is unexpectedly hidden thousands of feet above sea level.

Suffocating dogs was a common spectacle in the fumes of this noxious cave.

This deceiving white sand beach gets its brilliant hue from the chemical discharge of a nearby factory.

The oldest scientifically dated tree in Europe lives on a remote cliff.

An abandoned building that once tightened a power line that stretched across Messina Strait.

The link between these two seemingly disparate themes is crucial to the history of this Tuscan hill town.

With its mine closed, this old village is starting to resemble a ghost town.

Italy's "New Mountain" rose from the ground in a volcanic eruption in 1538.

Deceased nuns were placed on stone chairs to decompose, while the surviving nuns prayed near the lifeless bodies.

Production site for handmade clay bricks.

Genoa's collection of over 4 million zoological, botanical, and geological specimens from around the world.

Dynamite factory turned museum explores the history of explosives.

An 11th-century mountaintop fortress that played a crucial role in Italy's papal wars is now a vacation rental.

The burial place of an obscure North African saint was turned into a macabre body preservation factory for the 17th-century Neapolitan elite.

Originally a leper colony, the island is now an Armenian monastery that's home to an incredible manuscript library and eclectic museum.

The former home of an Italian artist is now a shrine to his ambitious works.

A mushroom-shaped outcropping that has come to be the symbol for an entire town.

The Bourbon royal family had this unique octagonal hunting "cottage" built on a tiny islet in Lake Fusaro.

Climb the dead electric pylons of Messina.

A medieval wash house where people washed clothes in a river allegedly formed by the tears of a mourning nymph.

An abandoned quarry hides an open-air gallery of huge sculptures, some made from the rubble of 9/11.

This Italian ski resort rose to fame when Benito Mussolini was held prisoner there and then rescued by the SS.

A wood-and-steel sculpture garden featuring an artful interplay of nature and machinery.

This church, better known for its weeping portrait of the Virgin Mary, also houses the world's oldest existing piece of taxidermy.