How to build a bucket list: Skip the Mona Lisa

EVERYONE seems to have a bucket list. In fact, too many of us seem to have the same bucket list: Climb Mount Everest; see the Mona Lisa; visit Versailles; circumambulate Stonehenge; sashay after geisha in Kyoto; float through Venice; ogle the Crown Jewels. The lack of originality has led to the overcrowding of these fabled sites — and a lot of grumbling from the locals. It’s also put many of the objects and sites at risk: Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece at the Louvre has been assaulted several times. Stonehenge was spray painted by climate activists. Kyoto’s elegantly kimonoed geisha have been harassed by amateur paparazzi dressed in dungarees.

But what’s a “bucket list” in the first place? It comes from the title of a 2007 movie about two terminally-ill men (played by Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman) who travel the world to see and do everything they’ve dreamed of before they die — that is, kick the bucket. It helped that Nicholson’s character is a billionaire who can fund the project. Warner Brothers scored a healthy global profit from the film. More importantly, the title entered the 21^st century lexicon.

I’d rather see the world and live. It’s not that I think the aspirations we have in common are a bad catalog; but we’ve just been pursuing them like to-do lists, ticking things off without reflecting about what we’ve done or seen. Remember: Once you’ve reached a peak destination, you do have to return to everyday life. It would be a shame to do so unenlightened and unchanged. So this admittedly nerdy list is an antidote to some of that (I’ve been to three). The destinations require just as much planning as the more familiar rosters, but I think they provide a unique perspective on our objective of living — not dying — more fully. And, if some of you adopt one or two, it’ll also take some pressure off Kyoto, Venice, Everest, and the Louvre.

Skip the Mona Lisa: The room in Paris’s Louvre devoted to Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece is so packed with visitors many photographs show less of the painting than of smartphones raised in the air. Last year, the museum saw more than 7 million people, most of whom probably wanted a glimpse of La Gioconda.

There’s a less well known but just as enigmatic earlier work by the same artist. See the other Leonardo masterpiece, Lady with an Ermine, which is in the much, much less crowded Czartoryski Museum in Krakow, Poland. The sitter is Cecilia Gallerani, one of the most cultured women of the late 15^th century and the mistress of the Duke of Milan. Leonardo distills life in this painting with her gaze — just as he does with Mona Lisa’s smile. She stares off frame, perhaps at her lover, as she cuddles the animal that is a pun on one his titles. As one contemporary poet described what Leonardo has done, “He’s made her seem to listen, but not to speak.” There had been little like this depth of psychology in Western painting before.

The Mysterious Tortoises of the Mongol Khans: Mongolia has no native turtles. Yet standing within sight of the 16^th century Erdene Zuu Khilid, the country’s oldest surviving Buddhist monastery, are a couple of large carapaced monsters carved from stone, hailing from a couple of centuries before. The reptiles are all that remain of the site of Karakorum, the first capital of the Mongol empire, a city that evolved from the tent settlement Genghis Khan set up in the 13^th century. The statues were inspired by the mythical black turtle of the north, a potent symbol of fertility and eternity the Mongols borrowed from the Chinese they traded with and, for a while, ruled. Four were set up on the corners of the walled district where the Khan resided.

But that city itself is gone, its smaller relics residing in a nearby museum set up with Japanese funding. The Khan’s tortoises may not have the massive integrity of Stonehenge but they tell a wistful tale of how even the most fearsome empires can decline and fall and vanish.

Bigger than Versailles. The royal palace of Caserta, about a 40-minute drive outside of Naples, doesn’t quite get the 15 million visitors that Versailles has to deal with each year. But the immense residence of the Spanish side of the Bourbon dynasty receives its fair share. It is also substantially larger, both in breadth and height.

The Spanish-Neapolitan Bourbons, however, were not as rich as their French cousins. If it weren’t for all the attempt at grandiosity, it would be sad to see that some of the rooms could only be finished in trompe l’oeil not real marble and sculpture. But, just like the turtles of Mongolia, from that emanates a sic transit gloria mundi charm. The historical irony: The family line that, in part, ruled from Caserta outlasted their fancy French relatives. Spain still has a royal family and they are Bourbons.

Don’t Go Chasing Geisha. Kyoto is getting impatient with tourists. So you might want an alternative that’s got an even deeper history — and a population 14 times as large that makes it easier to absorb visitors. Chengdu — the capital of China’s Sichuan province — is about 1,000 years older than Kyoto; yet while the old capital of Japan seems bent on preserving the past, the Chinese city is one of the most dynamic and enterprising in the People’s Republic. Indeed, Chengdu is encouraging tourism with everything from giant pandas (which are native to Sichuan) to spicy culinary adventures to archaeological discoveries that have led to a rewriting of Chinese history.

To aficionados of the art of war, a visit to the memorial to Zhuge Liang in Chengdu is a must. The 3^rd century statesman was an exemplar of the “empty fortress” strategy of psychological warfare. Suddenly beset by an overwhelming number of invading troops, he ordered the few hundred defenders of his citadel to fling open the gates and keep out of sight, making it appear to be easy pickings. The besieging commander, however, then second-guessed himself, believing that Zhuge — already famous as a tactician — must certainly be planning an ambush. He withdrew.

Take the Low Road. The photos of trash littering the trails of Mount Everest belie the fact that only about 500 climbing permits are issued each year by the Nepalese government. If so much damage can be done by so few, think of what will happen when China starts allowing folks to scale the world’s highest peak from the Tibetan side of the mountain.

Why not try the Camino de Santiago de Compostela, the trail that’s been busy with pilgrims for a millennium. It isn’t as challenging as going 5-½ miles uphill with thin oxygen (and managing not to fall into some snow-obscured crevasse). Still it is almost 100 times longer than Everest is high. I have friends who do parts of the camino or all of it each year. Go in winter if you want less congested wayside inns. You don’t have to be religious to discover that walking can free your soul to wander in the world and in your head.

Your Choice: Canals or Backwaters? Venice (population: about 260,000) puts up more than 12 million tourists each year. It’s time to give La Serenissima a break. And if you like the idea of a gondola ride on a canal, consider the rice boats of Kerala, at India’s southwestern coast, that have been repurposed into floating houses. You can sleep the night on these kettuvallam as you meander through the huge network of lagoons, which the locals call backwaters but seem more like a giant serpentine lake. The boatmen will fish and cook for you. I remember the food being delicious. The resorts at the end of the voyage were luxurious but the night on the kettuvallam was unforgettable.

One Jewel to Outshine Them All: The Gemma Felix is a tiny stone, just 3.5 centimeters (1.4 inches) wide, hardly in the class of the crown jewels in the Tower of London. About 2.5 million gawk at the Windsor treasures each year. The Felix sits quietly in its case in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. But its provenance reaches farther back than the histories of British kings. Dating from the reign of Tiberius Caesar, the sardonyx seal is inscribed by Felix, the man who carved it, and belonged to a Roman bureaucrat who used it to mark documents as authentic and official.

Depicting a scene from the Trojan war — Ulysses accusing Diomedes of sacrilege — the jewel survived the empire’s fall and eventually came into the possession of some of the most prominent personages of Western civilization. Among them, Pope Paul II, who amassed much treasure for the papacy; Cardinal Francesco Gonzaga, one of the great power brokers in Italy, depicted by Mantegna in a fresco; the great English art collector Thomas Howard, the 2^nd Earl of Arundel, who purchased the Felix because King Charles I couldn’t afford to; and George, the 4^th duke of Marlborough from whose descendants sprang the Spencer-Churchill family, which includes Diana on one side and Winston on the other. So much in one little stone (my hazy photo does not come anywhere close to portraying Felix’s craftsmanship). And no crowds.

It may be that the economy will lighten the tourist load on the more famous bucket list destinations, as my colleague Andrea Felsted has recently .

But maybe the point is not to call the goals we long to reach “bucket lists.” In the end, the underlying notion of “kicking the bucket” is morbid. If we look beyond the euphemism, most of us will imagine a suicide standing on an upended pail ready to auto-asphyxiate from some joist — the container being knocked over by the death throes. The more likely origin of the term is grislier. The bucket — from the French trebuchet (also the word for a military catapult or the contraption used to torture witches by dunking them in water) — being a beam in an abattoir to which a pig’s back legs are tied, the animal hanging face down before its throat is slit. In its final squealing spasms, the pig’s hind trotters kick at the trebuchet.

Let’s make our lists about appreciating how far we’ve come from as a species — and where we might to go next.

BLOOMBERG OPINION