Italy

20 records from Sardinia, the Amalfi coast, the lakes, Tuscany and Umbria. The country with the collection's oldest ground and its most misleading vocabulary.

Three houses on the Costa Smeralda — Pitrizza, Romazzino and Cala di Volpe — were built for one client under one architectural committee within three years, and they hold their beaches three different ways: own, shared with the public strand beside it, and public ground with the hotel's club standing on it. Every published source calls all three private. This register does not.

On the Amalfi coast the question is vertical. Villa TreVille holds about two hectares of Positano cliff, cut with stairs and lifts down to its own dock, and that is an estate; the other houses in the town are addresses and belong in another register. Two hectares of cliff buy more separation than two hectares of flat ground ever would.

The lakes supply the contrast in density. Villa d'Este carries some hundred and fifty keys on ten hectares of Renaissance park running unbroken to its own lake frontage; Mandarin Oriental at Blevio carries seventy-five across nine separate historic houses in a botanical park. Both hold their waterline, which on a shore of villas long ago divided from their landings is the fact worth recording.