Otranto — where Italy ends, the sun rises first, and a cathedral floor contains everything

Otranto is the easternmost town in Italy. On clear mornings you can see Albania across the Strait. But the reason to come isn't the geography — it's the Cathedral floor. In 1163-1165, a monk named Pantaleone created a mosaic that covers the entire nave floor — 600 square meters depicting the Tree of Life, Alexander the Great, King Arthur, the zodiac, Adam and Eve, the Tower of Babel, and dozens of real and mythical animals. It's an encyclopedia of medieval knowledge laid in stone, and nobody outside Puglia has heard of it. Upstairs in the chapel: the skulls and bones of 813 martyrs killed by Ottoman Turks in 1480 for refusing to convert to Islam, displayed in a glass case behind the altar. The combination of a floor that celebrates life's complexity and a wall of bones that commemorates its brutality, in the same building, in a town at the edge of a continent — this is Italy at its most raw and most profound.