"To get there, we drove up a series of switchbacks and into a village built of river rocks that had been carried hundreds of feet up the mountain on the heads of local women. Once home to some 6,000 people, Belmonte today has only 40 year-round residents, and hundreds of the town’s structures are abandoned and crumbling. For $75 a night, we stayed in an albergo diffuso made up of two dozen of these once neglected buildings, which have been laboriously renovated into artful hotel apartments with mosaic tilework, rough-hewn wooden beams, and terraces shaded by reed awnings." - Freda Moon