One of my favorite periods in the visible history of Europe is the Romanesque, the period from the 10th to 13th centuries. The architecture is marked by fantastic stone carvings, some of them sexual (warning against the sins of the flesh, of course, but jarring to see in our day nonetheless).
The picture above, discovered as I decided to scan some old pictures of Sardinia, is a reminder of the elegance of this period. A simple Romanesque country church sits in a field immersed in wildflowers--no flying buttresses, no gargoyles.
There is a new website devoted to Romanesque Architecture in Italy called Itinera Romanica, featuring Romanesque itineraries in Corsica, Sardinia and Tuscany. If you like the Romanesque as much as I do, you might pop over there and see what treasures lie in the Italian countryside.