CASTLE in the CLOUDS

High atop an Umbrian hill, a family of design-minded aristocrats has turned its nearly 1,000-year-old Castello di Reschio into Italy's most extraordinary new hotel.

- ADAM ERACE

IT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE ONLY TEMPORARY, Conte Benedikt Bolza and wife Donna Nencia's stay in the castle. "Not because it was derelict," Nencia says before disappearing into a stone turret in a blur of amulets, feathers, and polka dots. "We do well with derelict."

The castle is Castello di Reschio, the couple's impeccable auberge in the cypress-dotted hills of northern Umbria. And it's impossible to imagine anyone not wanting to permanently move into one of the most anticipated hotels to open in Europe last year. But long before its May 2021 debut-before the embroiderers stitched scarlet Conte di Reschio monograms onto the crisp white bedsheets; before the first batch of house amaro landed on the exquisite not-so-mini-bars; before a portion of the old wine cellars was flooded with saltwater to create a wading grotto at the subterranean Bathhouse-Hotel Castello di Reschio, the centerpiece of the 3,750-acre Reschio estate, was a ruin.

Not just derelict, as Nencia says. "Squalid. After the war, people restored with what they had," she explains in the Boot Room, her open-air, fireplace-warmed flower workshop off the castle courtyard, where the jasminey-vanilla perfume of white clematis mingles with the lingering wood smoke of last night's blaze. "There was a lot of cutting corners in the previous owners' restoration, and it showed." And yet, she and Benedikt stayed for 11 years.