The Best Hotels Near Italia, by the Record
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A private elevator cut into the rock face delivers you to this 30-room mountain lodge perched above Zermatt's rooftops, with the Matterhorn filling every window. The late architect Ali Tayar layered American lodge warmth, crackling fires and brown leather, against a Turkish bath and Finnish sauna. Four dining options, an indoor-outdoor pool, and a flower steam room round out a place that holds a Forbes Four Star and takes the views entirely for granted.
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Twenty-four rooms in an 18th-century villa on Lake Como, each one individually designed and stuffed with original frescoes, Murano chandeliers, and the kind of gilded mirrors that make you feel briefly aristocratic. The terraced gardens run seven acres down to the water, and a vintage orange Fiat 500 handles property transport. Ranked fourth among the World's 50 Best Hotels, Passalacqua wears its grandeur lightly, the food is simple and seasonal, and the spa hides in a subterranean vault.
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A floating pool moored on Lake Como is somehow not even the most dramatic thing about this grand hotel. Once a cardinal's summer retreat, later a princess's, Villa d'Este has been welcoming guests since the 1870s, its 152 rooms filled with art and antiquities from centuries of noble owners. George Clooney is a neighbor; the rest of the regulars are merely famous. Forbes Four Star.
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Three Neoclassical villas, a boathouse, and six acres of lakeside gardens make this Forbes Five Star resort feel less like a hotel and more like an estate you've somehow talked your way into. The pool floats in the lake itself, the CO.MO lounge does aperitivo with the mountains behind it, and the original plaster moldings have been around since an opera singer owned the place. Everyone looks suspiciously relaxed by check-in.