Italy

Italy is best taken slowly, and in the order the land suggests. In the north, above Merano, the sunny Avelengo plateau looks across larch and spruce forest to the peaks of the Texel Group. Across the Apennines, Tuscany folds into vineyards, olive groves, cypress and stone hill towns that have made wine and oil for centuries. In the south, Capri rises from the Bay of Naples, all cliffs, lemon gardens and sea, and in Sicily the hills of the Palermo countryside still follow the seasons. Few countries change so completely in a morning’s journey, and few reward a long lunch as much as a morning in a museum.

In Tuscany we keep the list short and know each house well. Near Volterra, Borgo Pignano is a hamlet documented since 1139, its nine private villas scattered with their own pools and gardens across a 750-acre organic estate. In Chianti, Villa Gran Sogno is an adults-only house of five king rooms among the vines outside Castellina in Chianti, kept by its owners like a home. On the Silver Coast at Monte Argentario, Argentario Golf Villas sit on a car-free estate of cork oak and olive above Italy’s only PGA National golf course, with the Orbetello lagoon below. Near Lucca, in the quiet village of Vorno, Villa Marie is an exclusive-use villa of six suites for up to 12 guests, restored between 2018 and 2022, with two hectares of gardens, a lake, a private indoor spa and the attentive service of a fully staffed private resort. Florence, about an hour from Borgo Pignano and from Chianti, is the city we pair with the hills, and there Hotel L’Orologio Florence looks onto Piazza Santa Maria Novella, a short walk from the station and the Duomo.

In South Tyrol, on the sunny Avelengo plateau 1,400 metres above Merano, San Luis Retreat Hotel & Lodges is a hotel village of chalets and tree houses in forty hectares of private larch and spruce forest around a mountain lake, with a fireplace and a private sauna in every chalet and breakfast brought to your door.

On Capri, Villa Giada is a white villa of four suites in the quiet of Anacapri, with a pool among the umbrella pines, a master suite built into the volcanic rock and a chef in the house.

Further south, on the Cilento Coast, Villa Le Cannicelle is a family villa of five bedrooms for up to fourteen above the Gulf of Policastro, with an infinity pool, terraces over the sea and a taverna with a wood-fired oven, in a corner of Campania that mass tourism has largely passed by.

In Sicily, in the hills of the Palermo countryside near Polizzi Generosa, Susafa is an old farmhouse restored by the Saeli-Rizzuto family, who have farmed the land for five generations: rooms and suites in the old stables and workers’ houses, Semente in the former granary beneath a broad vaulted roof, and a table built on the estate’s own olive oil, flour and kitchen garden.

For hill houses across the wider Mediterranean, see our Mediterranean Hills collection, and for Florence, City Houses.