Ascoli Piceno, Italy

Ascoli Piceno sits where the Apennines fold down toward the Adriatic, built so entirely from a single pale stone that it's often called the world's only all-travertine city. Quarried a few kilometres away at Colle San Marco, the rock was Rome's building material of choice, and here it clads every wall, arcade and paving stone, giving the centro storico a uniform, sunlit calm rare in Italian towns. At its heart lies Piazza del Popolo, an elongated Renaissance rectangle ringed by an unbroken portico, closed at one end by the stark Gothic flank of San Francesco and at the other by the crenellated Palazzo dei Capitani. When rain falls, the whole square turns to mirror.

The Piceni people settled here a century before Rome existed, and the Romans, once they took the town in 268 BC, rebuilt it in the travertine that still holds it together. Ascoli did not stay compliant: in 91 BC, after a Roman magistrate provoked the city's elders once too far, its citizens killed every Roman inside the walls, an act that lit the Social War across Italy and cost Ascoli a year-long siege before it fell. In the free-commune centuries that followed, rival noble families competed by building towers — chroniclers counted as many as two hundred at the medieval peak, of which around fifty survive, giving the city its old epithet, città delle cento torri.

None of this is a museum exhibit; it's still the texture of the streets. Under the porticoes of Piazza del Popolo, Caffè Meletti has served coffee and its own anise liqueur since 1907, a stop for travellers on the Via Salaria, the old salt road that still threads the valley below. Locals fry olive all'ascolana — meat-stuffed green olives, breaded and deep-fried — in trattorie barely changed in decades, and every August the town reenacts its past in the Quintana, a jousting festival fought in costume by six historic districts. The old centre rewards a second look: honey-coloured at noon, pewter after rain, faintly luminous once the streetlamps come on.