All-Inclusive Resorts in Italy: Why They Don’t Exist and What to Do Instead

Italy does not have all-inclusive resorts in any meaningful sense, and this is not a gap in its tourism offering. It is a direct consequence of the country being Italy — a place where the breakfast table alone, with its local cheeses and its regional breads and its espresso pulled from a machine that has been calibrated to the specific water hardness of that particular town, constitutes an argument against eating uniformly for a week. The all-inclusive resort format was invented to solve the problem of destinations where the food outside the hotel is either unremarkable or inaccessible. Italy’s food outside the hotel is the reason for the visit, and no kitchen in any resort that feeds five hundred guests from a single menu can compete with the trattoria three streets away that has been making the same pasta with the same grandmother’s sauce for three generations and that charges fourteen euros for it.

There is a version of Italy that accommodates the desire for financial predictability — the full-board configurations at Sardinia’s larger resort properties, and the Forte Village in southern Sardinia which operates as a self-contained resort village on a full-board basis and which is the closest Italy comes to a genuine all-inclusive. But understanding what you give up by booking Italy as a contained resort experience rather than as an open-ended encounter with one of the world’s great food and cultural landscapes is the necessary first step of any Italian holiday planning.

Sardinia’s Costa Smeralda

The northeastern coast of Sardinia — the Costa Smeralda, developed as a private resort community by the Aga Khan in the 1960s — is where Italy’s resort culture is concentrated and where the hotels built by that original investment still carry the traces of what it meant to create a luxury destination from scratch on an undeveloped coastline. The Hotel Cala di Volpe, designed by Jacques Couelle in a style that mimics a Sardinian fishing village so convincingly that it took decades for visitors to recognise it was built rather than grown, is the most architecturally interesting hotel on the island. The Romazzino and the Pitrizza, smaller and quieter, are the correct choices for guests for whom the Costa Smeralda’s social scene is an option rather than the purpose.

The granite boulders and the turquoise water of the Costa Smeralda are not replicated anywhere else on the Mediterranean. The specific geological character of Sardinia’s northeast coast — the pink and orange granite meeting the water in formations that look like a sculptor’s work — produces a landscape that photographs cannot overstate. The Spiaggia del Principe, thirty minutes from the main resort area, is among the finest beaches in Europe and is comparatively unknown outside the Italian and French markets that have been visiting it for decades.

The Forte Village

The Forte Village in Santa Margherita di Pula in southern Sardinia is Italy’s closest equivalent to a self-contained resort destination — a village of individual hotels within a single coastal estate, each with its own character, connected by paths through gardens, sharing a thalassotherapy spa, a tennis academy, a children’s club, and a culinary programme that brings international guest chefs to the resort throughout the summer season. The full-board rate covers all meals across the resort’s restaurants. For families who want the Italian summer with the financial predictability of a single daily cost, it is the honest recommendation in the country. It is not cheap — the Forte Village is among the more expensive resort experiences in the Mediterranean — but it is genuinely comprehensive in a way that the standard Italian hotel room-only stay is not.

The Puglia and Sicily Question

The masserie of Puglia — the converted farmhouses in the countryside between Fasano and Ostuni, some dating from the seventeenth century, producing their own olive oil from trees that were old before the American continent was mapped — are the most distinctive accommodation available in southern Italy and the reason that food and design travellers have been coming to this corner of Puglia for twenty years. The Masseria Torre Coccaro, the Masseria Il Frantoio, the Borgo Egnazia are not all-inclusive properties. They are properties where the pleasure is staying in a beautiful place and eating what the land around it produces, which is precisely the opposite of the all-inclusive premise. For guests prepared to surrender the flat rate, they represent one of the most genuine luxury experiences available in Europe.

The Amalfi Coast and Lake Como

The Amalfi Coast and Lake Como — Italy’s two most internationally recognised luxury hotel destinations — have no all-inclusive properties and would be diminished by them. The Grand Hotel Quisisana in Capri, the Belmond Hotel Caruso in Ravello, the Villa d’Este on Lake Como, and the Grand Hotel Tremezzo are properties where the specific pleasure is the combination of the architecture, the location, the dining, and the service at the levels each represents. The all-inclusive rate’s premise — that the food provided by the single hotel is sufficient reason to forgo everything outside — would in each case be an argument against spending a week exactly where you are.

When to Go

May through September for the Italian summer. July and August are peak season everywhere — the most expensive, the hottest, and in the case of the Amalfi Coast and the Cinque Terre, the most overwhelmed by visitors. June is the correct month for Sardinia’s Costa Smeralda: warm enough for the water, still a week or two before the peak-season crowd makes the beaches competitive. September is the correct month for Puglia: the harvest is beginning, the temperatures are dropping from August’s peak, and the masserie are at their most themselves.

Forte Village Resort, Sardinia — Italy’s most comprehensive resort, full-board on Sardinia’s southern coast.