Behind some of the world’s most celebrated masterpieces are real Italian landscapes, vistas that legendary artists once gazed upon, reimagined, and immortalised on canvas. Thanks to decades of detective work by art historians and scholars, many of these sites have now been pinpointed on the map. That’s why we set out to discover the very places that sparked famous Italian paintings now showcased in the world’s most renowned museums.
Some now hang in the Louvre. Others are displayed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Gallery in London, or the Uffizi in Florence. But before they became masterpieces, they were ordinary corners of Italy. Leonardo da Vinci studied them with a scientist’s curiosity. Escher bent their forms into mind-bending geometries. Warhol splashed them into the realm of pop culture.
