[A Private Grand Tour] takes readers through the iconic monuments and lesser-known treasures of Italy’s great art centers, including Milan, Venice, Bologna, Florence, Siena and more. For an unforgettable Italian excursion, here are just a few of his favorite sites:

Maser: In Palladio’s Villa Barbaro, with eight rooms and a nymphaeum frescoed by Paolo Veronese, the heartbeat of 16th-century patrician civilization can still be sensed. Almost miraculously the villa remains a private residence.

Cortona: Still largely confined within walls first built by the Etruscans, Cortona was the birthplace of a great artist, Luca Signorelli. However it is for the incomparable Annunciation by Fra Angelico that we return: one of the predella panels shows the little-changed view southwards towards Lake Trasimene.

Segesta: There are more well-preserved Greek temples in southern Italy than in Greece itself. None is more nobly sited than that of the late 5th century B.C. structure at Segesta in Sicily. Happily the setting remains as untrammelled as when Edward Lear painted it.

Monte San Giusto: Among the numerous small towns of the Marche many boast remarkable treasures. But none is more extraordinary that the Crucifixion of 1531 by Lorenzo Lotto that dominates the modest church of Santa Maria in Telusiano. The charged drama of the design owes much to Lotto’s genius as a colourist.

Atri: Many Italian cities testify to the artistic ambition of members of the princely dynasties that held these. Atri in the Abruzzi was ruled from 1395 until 1775 by the Acquaviva family, who employed a local artist with a taste for narrative, Andrea Delitio, to fresco the choir of the Cathedral in the mid-15th century.

Segesta is my favourite site in Sicily and returned there six years ago to find it still pristine with few visitors unlike the sites in Greece last week.

Every page a delight.