The Italy Matrix
Fourteen places, placed honestly. Fifty places to stay, and I’d book every one of them.
If you commented ITALIA, this is the full list. Every hotel I’d put a client in across Italy, grouped by place, with a link to my review of each one.
The matrix comes first, because the right hotel starts with the right place. Lake Como and the Dolomites are both beautiful and they are completely different trips. Then the hotels: forty-nine of them, plus one that moves.
First things first Getting around Italy Before the hotels, how you’ll move between them: private drivers, boats and helicopters, and the few legs where the train wins. Read the guide →Or start from a full route: 10 days · 14 days · 21 days
Rustic to polished is about what the place expects of you. Rustic means a trattoria and a rental car. Polished means a concierge, a dress code, and a driver waiting outside.
Undiscovered to well-trodden is about the crowds you’ll actually meet in season, not about whether anyone has written about it.
The Dolomites
Read the full Dolomites guide →
Lake Como
Read the full Lake Como guide →
The Italian Riviera
Santa Margherita · Portofino
Venice
Florence
Read the full Florence guide →
The same family runs Gallery Hotel Art in Florence and Portrait hotels in Rome and Milan. More in the Lungarno Collection.
Tuscany
Rome
The Amalfi Coast
Positano · Amalfi · Ravello
Puglia
The Bonus: Sicily
Sicily isn’t on the matrix. It’s big enough to be its own country, and placing it on one chart wouldn’t be honest. One hotel there made my list anyway.
And One Train
Number fifty doesn’t stay in one place. La Dolce Vita Orient Express runs between Rome and Venice, and I’ve written up how to pair it with La Minerva and the Venice palazzo.
Places I Know and Love
The Aeolian Islands · Umbria · Ischia · Capri
The hollow rings on the matrix. I don’t have a hotel pick in any of these yet, which isn’t the same as not sending people there. Tell me you’re curious about one and I’ll tell you how I’d fit it into the trip.
Most Italy trips are two or three of these places, not five. The hard part is the order, the transfers, and which hotel suits which leg.
I wrote up how I handle that in Getting Around Italy, with complete routes for 10, 14 and 21 days.
Which one is yours?
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