Horizontal hotels: Italy’s revolutionary new resort concept

BORING, regular hotels are so yesterday. These stunning Italian resorts are turning traditional travel on its head. They’re being called “horizontal hotels”.

The Grotte resort entrance is in one part of town, the rooms in another. Picture: Silvia Marchetti

BORING vertical hotels in high-rise towers are so yesterday in Italy. There’s a new kind of accommodation that’s revamping underdeveloped areas in the south.

Welcome to what Italians have dubbed as “horizontal resorts” that spread across entire primitive, ancient Roman and medieval villages. Rooms and the different areas — the lobby, reception, library, dining hall and cocktail lounge — are not packed in one single building as in traditional hotels but are scattered here and there like breadcrumbs. Staying in these places is a bit like going on a crazy treasure hunt. You get to sleep in former barns, stables and pigsties. Dine in dungeons and rock crypts. Have breakfast and lunch at real hamlet bars and taverns and rub shoulders with residents. You end up blending in with surroundings, feeling very much like a local. These strange resorts keep guests fit, as a lot of physical activity is required to move from the front lobby to your suite or restaurant and other parts, but this way you achieve two goals: sightseeing and leg stretching as elders seated on front porches greet you with a warm ‘buongiorno!’. SEMPRONIANO, TUSCANY “Living such experience is fun, exciting and energy-consuming. Perfect for curious and active globetrotters who don’t like rotting in one location,” says Fulvio Ponziano, the manager of one such resort in Semproniano, a former Roman settlement in Tuscany. He decided to restyle a bunch of his family’s old houses and bought other dwellings by knocking at the door of his co-villagers with an offer that drove them out. “We’re one big family. My clients are more than tourists, we become friends and end up dining, drinking and having fun together. We even go kayaking and to thermal baths,” he says. MATERA, SOUTHERN ITALY Garotte resort in Matera, set in the deep south, is a maze of grotto suites connected by steep steps that unwind through the precipice of stones of the historical Sassi district. The tiny reception, part of a former monastery, is located at the entrance of the resort which is at the lower part of town while most rooms are scattered all the way to the upper street layers. Matera is shaped like Dante Inferno’s — imagine going up and down a funnel. As I make my way through it looking for my suite, I bump into local folk who jog or walk their dog. “Working here keeps me fit, I don’t need to go to the gym. This is more than a simple hotel, it’s a piece of the burg,” says manager Michele Centonze. I sleep in a cave which used to be where poor farmers lived in inhuman conditions, close to their stinky animals with pots for toilet. But I’m luckier: my bathroom is made of two adjoining grottos with a fountain gushing out of the red rock — the shower! These holes, where hermits and Templar Knights also took refuge across the centuries, up until 1970s stood as the “national shame” of Italy. Now they’ve been turned into deluxe hotels and a winning tourist asset. SANTO STEFANO, ABRUZZO Distances get even further at the horizontal resort spread across the tiny mountain town of Santo Stefano in Abruzzo. There you can eat inside old dungeons and sorceress havens that feel like something from the set of Game of Thrones. Getting to the restaurants require a good dose of walking, good for burning calories when you return after dinner with a bloated belly. The only trouble with these horizontal resorts is that if you need to run to the loo, you need to make it all the way back to your own dwelling — fast.