Umbria, Italy · Castle from the 11th century · opened 2021 · Bolza family · 36 rooms and suites
By invitation. Benedikt Bolza spent twenty-five years restoring the estate's farmhouses before touching the castle itself. The result is the rarest thing in Italian hospitality: a hotel that is the product of one person's taste over a quarter of a century.
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Three thousand seven hundred acres of oak forest, olive groves and farmland, with fifty restored houses scattered across it. The Bolza family bought the estate in 1994 and spent the following decades restoring it building by building, using estate materials and an in-house workshop. The castle opened last, in 2021, which is the correct order and explains the coherence.
Thirty-six rooms inside walls that predate most of Europe's nation states, furnished with Bolza's own designs — a bed, a lamp and a tap in a Reschio room are all the estate's work. The Palm Court in the former courtyard is the social room; the cellar bar beneath the castle is the one to end the evening in.
Riding is the centre of the operation — the stables hold some forty horses and the trails run for miles without leaving the property. There is also a spa cut into the castle's foundations, a pool in the former citrus garden, and a working farm that supplies the kitchen. Guests routinely stay a week and never leave the gate.
It is genuinely remote — Perugia is an hour, Florence two — and a car or the house's drivers are mandatory. There is one restaurant. And the aesthetic is so complete that guests who want variety, or a beach, are in the wrong place.
A tower room in the Castello for the view across the estate, or — the genuinely private option — one of the restored farmhouses on the estate, taken whole, with staff and a pool, at a distance measured in kilometres from the next guest.
The purest example in Italy. Everything from the door handles to the bath taps was designed and made on the estate; there is no brand anywhere, no piped music, and the nearest town is small enough to be irrelevant.
May, June, September and October. Umbrian August is hot; winter is atmospheric and the castle handles it well.
from €900 per night
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