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St Peter’s is bigger than your eyes will accept at first. The best way to take it in is to climb: up to the roof, then between the shells of Michelangelo’s dome to the view over Rome.
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It looks just like the postcards until you walk inside. Through the arches, the Colosseum opens up into a vast bowl of stone, with the tunnels of the hypogeum laid bare beneath the arena.
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Florence began its cathedral with a hole in the roof and no idea how to close it. On an evening walk around the Duomo, the marble glows, and Brunelleschi’s dome still fills the end of every street.
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Off the coast of Vigo, the protected Cíes Islands have no cars, one of Spain’s most beautiful beaches and a long path up to a lighthouse. We walked it under a cool grey sky.
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On the north coast of Galicia, low tide reveals a hidden landscape of rock arches and passages. We walked the sand under the great arches of Praia das Catedrais before the sea came back.
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Along Galicia’s Coast of Death, a river falls straight to the sea at Ézaro, and at Muxía a split granite memorial stands above a sanctuary built right on the rocks.
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The Museo de los Molinos de Mazonovo near Taramundi has 19 mills, and many of them only run if you work them yourself. The sign outside calls it the largest mill museum in Spain.
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The Tower of Hercules in A Coruña was built by the Romans almost 2,000 years ago, and it is still a working lighthouse. You can walk through its foundations and climb to the top.
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Beyond Santiago the land runs out at Fisterra, the headland the Romans named the end of the earth. We went out to the lighthouse and the rocks for the evening light on the Atlantic.
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The Camino ends at the cathedral door, but the building deserves a day of its own. We went back to see the baroque west front, the packed nave and the stepped granite roof high above the city.
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