The Best Hotels and Resorts in Europe and the UK: The Gold List 2025

"Reschio, an estate in Umbria not far from Perugia, comprises 3,700 quite outrageously beautiful acres of rolling hills, olive groves, vineyards, forest, farm buildings and, looming darkly over it all, a curtain-walled 11th-century castle. The most radical of the many changes Castello di Reschio has undergone in its long history is the most recent: its transformation from a place designed to keep people out to one redesigned to welcome them in. After a thousand or so years as a fortress, the castle opened, in 2021, as a 36-room hotel. The success of its reinvention has to do entirely with its owner-proprietors, Count Benedikt Bolza, an architect and designer, and his wife, Donna Nencia Corsini, an artist and environmentalist. The hotel is a lucid expression in three dimensions—in wood and stone and bronze, in silk and velvet and linen, in wildflowers and works of art and kooky knickknacks—of the couple’s shared enthusiasms, their style, their outlook on life. Castello di Reschio works brilliantly as a hotel and does all the things that a top hotel must do. (Is there a chicer palm-court bar, a more astonishing spa, or a lovelier swimming pool in rural Italy? Or anywhere?) More than that, the castle hotel is just one part of the much larger Reschio story, the point of entry into what has often—predictably, though not without reason—been characterized as a modern-day fairy tale. From $1,010. —Steve King" - CNT Editors