It’s not often that we’re left speechless by a home (we’ve come across a fair amount in our time), but The Academy comes close. It’s more like a museum than a place to live, filled as it is with statues, antiques, oil paintings, textiles, you name it. And if the interior weren’t enough, there’s a terrace with views of the Duomo, and the river is just round the corner. It’s not perfect (nowhere is), and it is an old building with a few signs of age, but when a place looks like this, we’re willing to look past those.