True White Space for Italian Hotels

For Consideration

• Over six months ago I had shared the trailer for a documentary set in the fascinating to me town of Natchez, Mississippi and, at the time, it felt like the May release date was forever away. It won Best Documentary at the 2025 Tribeca Film Festival and it’s finally out, and in full on YouTube because PBS rocks. As someone who’s only ever lived in the Bay Area, LA, and NYC in the US (converging bubbles, to be sure), I genuinely found this fascinating as well as important.

• Boston’s Logan Airport is about to launch the country’s first “remote terminal” which allows passengers on certain flights to essentially go through security at a parking lot and then be taken by bus directly to your gate. Exciting!

• My favorite class at as an art history major at UCLA was American Houses, and we kicked off the semester learning about Cahokia, a thriving metropolis in the area around current St. Louis far before the continent was colonized. I love my YouTube algorithm, because this video on the subject completely re-sparked my interest.

• This points out exactly why I do what I do. Hotels are hot, but almost all of them look the damn same and thus feel like nothing. Happy Hoteling is where you come to find the places that are one-of-a-kind. The Special ones.

• Lastly, I must say something about staying in AirBnBs in European city centers, Florence, specifically. The apartment below mine is one, to the utter annoyance of the rest of the building. I can hear everything when there are guests (thank god it’s not constant). After 11 months of living here, I feel like I have collected enough first-hand data to say that Americans are the main problem. There is a total disregard for the fact that you are sleeping in a building where people live, full-time, and have real, full-time jobs. There are groups of Gen Z American girls who I have jumped on my floor so loudly for because they simply will not stop screeching all at the same time at 5am when they come home from partying, only for them to do it again when they wake up three hours later. But it’s not just the young people – currently, there is a couple in their 50s sleeping below me. I don’t know if it’s the current moment in American history, but this is a common occurrence – a lot of yelling from the man at the woman. Today, I heard shut up at least ten times and the slamming of doors seemingly every time they were opened. This city has made a lot of reform to try to negate this behavior and lower the amount of AirBnBs in the historic center but there’s still a problem. And yes, I am aware that I am myself an American, but I do live here, and the other next door neighbor is a man in his sixties who was diagnosed with cancer a month ago and really doesn’t deserve this sh!t. Please stay at a hotel, or stay in an AirBnB where you are not surrounded by locals. And no, the Italian and Spanish guests are not even close to as loud as the American guests. I can hear maybe five words a day when they speak, not every single one.

For Consumption

• Mango is doing well this summer, even in swim. This is simple and versatile and a good color that plays well with sunscreen. Top, bottoms.

• This is what I call great for a boat day.

• I have been wearing this men’s Babar x Rowing Blazer button down on repeat.

• The fab yellow loafers I shared a bit ago are on sale! If you follow me on Instagram you know I have become a Yellow Loafer Girl.

• There’s something so classic and equally fun about a great red and white polka dot dress.

Happy Hoteling!

xMarissa

P.S. My season of Italian Happy Hoteling begins this week. I can’t wait to take you all along for the ride.

I’ve often had a bone to pick with acting on what the data shows. Granted, my world has always largely been a creative one.

I like to swim in the sea of what the data does not show, or what it hasn’t even considered. The white space. The emotional opportunities, you could say. Solving small problems for a small group of people instead of trying to solve the problems for the masses. The data comes from the masses and the masses are not really the guests most luxury hotels want (or should want). Plus, it’s always good to create magic that no one has asked for. Most people have no idea what they want until it’s in front of them.

I would like to do this for Italian hotels. I do consider myself to have extensive knowledge on the subject that goes far beyond the surface or even the center. The hotels that make the cut live on the Google Map (avail for Founding Members or on happyhoteling.com), creating easy visual white space.

Not all white space is interesting space and therefore potentially emotional space to tread. Even with so many hotels throughout Italy, and increasingly more, there’s still a whole lot of similar which makes real room for something Special.

For me, the biggest opportunities I see connect the beautiful reality of visiting a place and being able to stay within that same dream overnight. When a small guest house finally opened in Sperlonga, the wonderful ancient Etruscan town on the coast of Lazio, I was thrilled – that’s the type of place you want to stay the night, and not somewhere that feels like a total disconnect from the magic in the air.

One of my “niches” is going off the typical American tourist path in Italy, specifically in hotels (and the sky is blue and grass green). I’m aware that’s what a good chunk of you are here! And with this, I’ve learned that there is an equal appetite, if not an even greater one, in the hotels that are in a place that means absolutely nothing to 99% of the travel content consuming public. Thank god that as soon as I left TikTok I never received a single other DM about Positano.

You people are my people – willing and wanting to go somewhere new, and seek out special instead of only ease, recognition, or high luxury.

Today, I want to go where the data doesn’t, to the places in Italy that may not have the tourist traffic now, but could have an eternally-booked hotel if it was really great.

I’m sick of the incessant refrain of the past three years that “Ischia is the hidden gem island you’ve never heard of and need to go to, stat.” One, it’s not true when it’s said in droves, and two, it’s not true because of the fact that it has loooong been an island packed with hotels in every corner. Sure, my first visit to the isle in 2019 heard more German spoken than 2022 and after’s English, but that’s because of ONE HOTEL being reborn, Mezzatorre. Yes, it was a hotel even just the year prior – it just needed a visionary creative to speak to the American audience, which is the most vocal audience.

Now, there are certain places, especially on the coast, where Italians deserve to not hear English spoken at an increasingly high rate. I have taken that into major account with all my ideas below – I am hyper-aware of the balance between Italy’s dependence on tourism and Italians’ struggle with their lives changing so drastically because of over-tourism. I live in Florence, and before that, my dad lived here for 25 years and left “when the tour buses came.” That was the ‘80s, and now we have not only the internet, not only TikTok and Instagram, but goddamn AI too.

I’m a firm believer that new hotels should both support and reflect the reality of its home – the appetite for tourism, the land, the culture, and what makes it unique. There are too many new hotels opening, in my eyes, for the sake of following the data. Does the Tuscan countryside need more and more and more luxury hotels with rates over $1,000/night that most Italians can’t afford? I’d argue no, but there are so many in the pipeline because Tuscany is always trending upwards.

Some places, like Ponza, for example, would be ruined if one of the two larger hotels were bought and renovated and quadrupled in price. It also wouldn’t make much sense – sure, English is spoken in Ponza, but not up to the arrogant American luxury traveler’s standard. There are not enough taxis. There are not enough ferries. The magic of the place lies in the scarcity of many of its tourism infrastructure, which is why it remains sacred for Italians (and this American).

But then there’s somewhere like the Cinque Terre, where the infrastructure is there, the local lives have already been altered, yet there is not one single realllly good hotel. There is a hotel that has all of the bones to become one – Hotel Porto Roca. No new construction, no ruining the landscape, but an acquisition and reimagining of this property could be a huge addition. That will be one of the six hotel ideas below, but only one other is also a takeover of an existing place.

I also see immense white space for Italy to lead the way (or meet Morocco and India’s match, perhaps) of designing and constructing new buildings to the standards and levels of craftsmanship that they were until the Fascist era. This is a country with both tradition and talent of using one’s hands, and true craftsmanship from the bottom up is something that substantiates a four-digit-per-night pricetag.

Italy as a culture is so innately playful, so creative, so steeped in culture, yet so many new (or hit) hotels are none of these things. This is white space, too.

Before I go into the ideas, I want to be clear that I am playing pretend in hopes of whetting palates – I’m sure some of these places have regulations around building or have been owned by the same family for three-hundred years and will never sell or any other matters of red tape. As I’ve mentioned before, in my advertising career I was never brought to the big boardrooms for my practicality, I was invited for my visions of possibilities and my immense distaste of unoriginality.

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My core thoughts that drove the ideas – cohesion is a killer of creativity. Play is luxurious. Framing and light are emotional. Cinema can be real life. Death to the ugly new “luxury” copy paste, rebirth to the unreplicable experiences.

Geographically, for this exploration I divided between white space for the typical Italian tourist who doesn’t know all that much of the country, and actual white space for there to be the first great hotel in a great, less-trodden location.

Six hotel ideas, four fully-fleshed out with moodboards. Two are imagined new lives for existing hotels, the rest would be new. All different, but all realized through the same goals – to create awe, provoke play, inspire with color, root to the land, celebrate Italian craftsmanship, and add instead of detract from the country’s hotel ecosystem.

Lastly, before the paywall hits, Grand Hotel Miramare in Castiglioncello is a hotel that precisely fits in the white space I’m interested in and has been in re-development for the past three years – does anyone have any intel?! I desperately want it to be re-born.