Bologna

Bologna is the Italy that Italians keep a little to themselves. It has no one monument everybody queues for, no Duomo crowd, no leaning tower, and that's precisely why it stays real. This is a working city, a university city, a food city, lived in by people who actually live here rather than visitors passing through. They call it la dotta, la grassa, la rossa (the learned, the fat, the red) for its ancient university, its extraordinary cooking, and its terracotta rooftops. Spend a week here and you stop performing Italy and start inhabiting it.