Contemporary design on the Amalfi coast — that alone makes La Minervetta worth noting. The hotel’s twelve guest rooms are bright and sunny — literally, with views through full-length windows over Sorrento, the Bay of Naples and Mount Vesuvius, and figuratively as well, clean-lined and decked out in vivid tones, anywhere from lime green and turquoise to simple, almost Nordic primary colors.

At Lupaia, the “Tuscan rustic” farmhouse charm is cranked up to eleven or twelve, especially in its open kitchen, where a daily four-course dinner is made out of produce from the hotel’s own organic garden. And it’s in plentiful supply in the rooms as well, carefully adapted from five painstakingly renovated historical structures, each of which is an architectural mosaic of Tuscan styles.

Italian hoteliers are no strangers to working with heritage buildings, but Castello di Reschio is an extreme example. Set on a vast estate in the picturesque hills of Umbria, the castle dates back all the way to the tenth century, which makes the decade-plus its owners spent on careful restoration seem like the blink of an eye by comparison. Given the results you’d have to agree it was worth the wait.

The first wave of Milanese boutique hotels were grand gestures, tasked with representing Italy’s design capital to the world. Vico Milano, by contrast, is a more personal vision, but no less stylish — its public spaces are dazzling, filled with design furniture and contemporary art, while its seven rooms are handsome in a more relaxed way, delicately balanced between sparse simplicity and organic warmth.

Sirmione isn’t just any lakeside municipality, but a narrow peninsula extending from the southern shore of Lake Garda. Villa Cortine, once a count’s residence, sits on a hill above the town center. Rooms are divided between the original Palladian villa and an addition that dates back to the opening of the hotel in the Fifties. Throughout, however, the style is resolutely old-world.

There’s no escaping the past in Venice; even the Venice Venice Hotel, dedicated as it is to “postvenezianità” — post-Venetian-ness — finds itself in the 13th-century Byzantine-style Palazzo Ca’ da Mosto, overlooking the Grand Canal and the Rialto Bridge. Its owners, however, have their sights set squarely on the future, and take their inspiration from the avant-garde spirit that they feel has always been an integral part of Venetian life.

As the name hints, this discreet little four-room bolthole is nothing if not residential. And a remarkably stylish residence it is. At Residenza B, architect Stefano Dorata turned a 19th-century building into something quite modern — which, in Rome, means there are plenty of echoes of the past, in the form of travertine marble in the bathrooms as well as vintage and retro-inspired furniture alongside modernist classics.

The hilltop village of Civita di Bagnoregio is a vision so magnificent that you’ll have a hard time believing that Italians once nicknamed the place “the dying city.” But when an earthquake struck in 1685, residents fled. Centuries later, an Italian psychologist and his wife bought the old seminary and transformed it into a fantastically charming guesthouse called Corte della Maestà.

If you’ve got some facility with the Italian language you’ll have recognized that I Borghi dell’Eremo is plural. This is not a single farmhouse hotel, but three distinct “villages,” each one serving a different purpose for guests, but all constructed in a similar contemporary-classic style — and all with the same stunning views of the countryside on the border between Tuscany and Umbria.

Como’s Palazzo Albricci Peregrini is owned by a family, still in residence, who’ve sectioned off a part of a centuries-old house and transformed it into a modern boutique hotel in that perfectly Italian style, which blends weathered stone and antique architectural details with the latest in contemporary luxury design, as well as eclectic vintage objects and contemporary artworks.

Hotel Vilòn aims to provide not just luxury-hotel service and comfort, but residential charm and intimacy as well. The setting, in the city’s historic center, in a 16th-century house annexed to the Palazzo Borghese, is as romantic as it gets, and close by to many of the familiar attractions. But not for a moment does it feel like a busy city-center hotel; once inside, the quiet is practically monastic.

Tuscany’s Montalcino is famous for the walled hilltop city, its idyllic surroundings, and the region’s coveted sangiovese grosso wines. And to that list of attractions you can add at least one extraordinary hotel. Villa le Prata – Residenza del Vescovo is a scant five minutes’ drive from the city walls, and it’s as pure an introduction to the delights of Tuscan countryside living as you could possibly ask for.

There’s perhaps no more famous classic Italian getaway than the Tuscan villa hotel — but closely related, and perhaps a touch more dramatic, is the Umbrian watchtower hotel. Hotel Tenuta di Canonica stands on a hilltop just across the Tiber river from the old town of Todi, and while the tower itself is of medieval vintage, its foundations are Roman in origin — and the hotel is positively steeped in millennia of history.

Built by Baron Oppenheim for his bride in the nineteenth century, during Florence’s brief turn as Italy’s capital, Villa Cora still feels like a private residence. This neoclassical mansion sits on the outskirts of Florence, yet is still convenient to the city, near the Boboli Gardens and the Piazzale Michelangelo. The interiors are opulent, as one would expect from a historic Italian villa, especially in Florence.