The Best Resorts in Italy

A bell tower, a piazza, a fortified perimeter, an actual church: Borgo Egnazia was built from nothing and looks like it has been there for centuries, which is either charming or slightly uncanny depending on your mood. It's a luxury resort in Puglia, and the fantasy of a sun-bleached Italian village is the whole point. On the World's 50 Best Hotels list, it draws guests who are happy to settle into that fiction completely.

Liz Taylor honeymooned here four times, which says something about either the hotel or her taste in husbands. Splendido is a coastal resort above Portofino's harbour, terraced Ligurian gardens framing views that haven't changed much since the place was a monastery. Bow-tied bartenders, a resident pianist, and tomato spaghetti that's been on the menu long enough to become legend. A recent renovation updated the rooms; the views stayed exactly as they were. It holds a spot on the World's 50 Best Hotels list.

A 1,500-hectare Umbrian estate where the rooms used to be farm ruins and oak woodlands, restored over decades by one family with an evident allergy to cutting corners. Reschio is a countryside hotel that lands somewhere between working estate and fever dream: stone, hills, biodiversity, and the particular quiet that only comes with that much land around you. It ranked on The World's 50 Best Hotels list.

Perched at 1,800 metres in the South Tyrol, this spa resort sits close enough to the clouds that the distinction feels negotiable. Floor-to-ceiling windows and stone-accented interiors keep the architecture out of the landscape's way rather than competing with it, and balconied rooms make ignoring the Dolomite peaks essentially impossible. A spot on The 50 Discovery list confirms the pilgimage has a point.

A 16th-century watchtower anchors this resort on Ischia's quieter western edge, part of the Pellicano group but content to let its more famous sibling steal the spotlight. Rooms and cottages sit inside a lush private park, dressed in hand-painted tiles, handwoven wall hangings, and soft creams that feel less like a design brief and more like someone's actual taste. A private bay keeps the crowds at arm's length.

An 800-year-old Tuscan villa set across 200 acres of gardens, wild land, and a working kitchen garden, all of it painstakingly restored by its Danish owners into a boutique resort that somehow feels like a very grand private home. The grounds alone justify the visit, but the interiors match them beat for beat. A Discovery from The World's 50 Best Hotels, and easy to see why once you're standing in the orto at dusk.

The Ferragamo family bought an entire medieval Tuscan hamlet and turned it into a resort, which is a sentence that explains a great deal about the atmosphere. Il Borro's 38 suites occupy centuries-old stone buildings scattered across the property, each fitted with exposed beams, open fireplaces, and antiques chosen by hand. The kind of place where the grounds themselves feel like the amenity, and the village outside your door has been there since the thirteenth century.

A medieval castle in the Maremma countryside, converted into a ten-suite boutique hotel where the kitchen is rustic and the service feels like a neighbor insisted you stay. Marble pools sit among cypress trees, with olive groves and vineyards rolling out in every direction, and the gardens smell the way Tuscany is supposed to smell in other people's photos. It's castle-as-farmhouse, and somehow more relaxing for it.