With so much to see (or better, experience), three days in Rome may only be enough to scratch the surface and get a small taste of the city. Five days will allow you to do a bit more excavation, to spend a bit more time staring up at the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican Museum or lingering a bit longer over a cappuccino at an outdoor café on Piazza Navona. A week in Rome is ideal, giving you ample time to get lost in the labyrinth of streets around Campo dei Fiori, to get a better understanding of the layers of history that lie underneath the cobblestones, to peak into some of the city's 400+ churches, and to explore all the ancient Roman sights.But don't fret if you can't see and experience everything Rome has to offer in one trip. After all, Silvio Negro, an Italian writer who made a career out of writing about Rome, once said of the Eternal City, "Rome, a lifetime is not enough." He was right.

Coloane Village, like many sections of this outpost established by Portuguese traders in 1557 and handed back to China in 1999, is an intriguing fusion of European and Asian cultures. It follows the contours of the harbor, with the vivid red Tam Kung Temple (a Taoist shrine to the god of the seafarers) at one extreme, shops selling a curious array of dried salted fish at the other, and, somewhere in the middle, Lord Stow's Bakery, home of exceptional egg tarts. But when I look past the fishing pier at the far end of the harbor, I can see the cluster of cranes that marks the Cotai Strip, which has been hailed by its developer, the Las Vegas Sands Corporation, as "the biggest tourism project in world history.""Cotai" is a coinage for the three-quarter-mile sliver of reclaimed swampland that connects Coloane to Taipa, the next island over. If there's no traffic, it's a swift five-minute drive from the Macau airport and roughly the same distance from the border from Zhuhai, China. The concept—which supposedly came to Sands CEO Sheldon Adelson in a dream—is simple: "We want to replicate the Vegas strip," Medardo "Mikki" Estrada, the Sands Corporation's director of Cotai design, explains, "but with a more disciplined approach." Estrada's office on Macau's peninsula overlooks the posh 165,000-square-foot gold glass-clad Sands casino that the company opened in 2004 on Avenida da Amizade (Friendship Avenue), a wide boulevard lined with vintage 1960's and 1970's casinos that tourism boosters sometimes refer to as "the new Macau Strip."