Павия

Pavia keeps kings, saints and a tenor's theatre under its towers. Capital of the Lombard kingdom, it crowned monarchs in San Michele's grey Romanesque — Charlemagne took the Iron Crown's realm here — and its churches guard extraordinary sleepers: in San Pietro in Ciel d'Oro, beneath a Gothic ark of carved marble, lies St Augustine himself, with Boethius, philosophy's martyr, in the crypt below — Dante saluted the church in the Paradiso, and few naves anywhere hold such a syllabus.

The university continues the lecture: among Europe's oldest, it counts Volta's battery among its glories — his instruments and chair are relics on display — and fills the town with the cloistered courtyards, historic colleges and student energy that make Pavia Lombardy's Oxford, the Covered Bridge over the Ticino its postcard and passeggiata.

Music's address bears a native voice: the Teatro Fraschini, the elegant eighteenth-century house named for Gaetano Fraschini — Pavia's tenor, Verdi's favourite creator of dramatic roles — sustains opera and concert seasons in which the Orchestra Filarmonica Italiana is a familiar presence, the city's stage linking it to the wider circuit of Italian music-making. Downstream waits the apotheosis: the Certosa di Pavia, the charterhouse whose marble façade is Lombard Renaissance ambition complete. Crowns, saints, voltage and bel canto: Pavia's syllabus never thinned.