Abruzzo, Italy

Sextantio Albergo Diffuso

Price per night from$120.98

Price information

If you haven’t entered any dates, the rate shown is provided directly by the hotel and represents the cheapest double room (including tax) available in the next 60 days.

Prices have been converted from the hotel’s local currency (EUR111.82), via openexchangerates.org, using today’s exchange rate.

Style

Fortress conversion

Setting

Scattered around Santo Stefano

Sextantio Albergo Diffuso is a brand new boutique concept: bits of the hotel are spread around a micro-village in the Italian Apennines. It’s a throw-back to the Middle Ages, with craftwork made by villagers, restoration-revived traditions and rustic simplicity maintaining the hilly hamlet’s mediaeval charm, but with modern luxury seamlessly incorporated.

 

Smith Extra

Get this when you book through us:

Local liquors and cookies and snowshoe hire; members staying three nights or more also get a herbal-tea tasting and several on-site discounts

Facilities

Photos Sextantio Albergo Diffuso facilities

Need to know

Rooms

27, including seven suites.

Check–Out

11am, but flexible if there’s availability. Earliest check-in, 3pm.

Prices

Double rooms from £105.40 (€123), including tax at 10 per cent.

More details

Rates include Continental breakfast.

Also

Stake out the library: a place of wooden beams and painted ceilings, where you can browse the odd ancient tome over afternoon tea.

At the hotel

Library, free WiFi throughout. In rooms: minibar and artisan bath products.

Our favourite rooms

Palazzo delle Logge overlooks the village square and the Medici gate. For views out to the Apennines from the lounge and balcony, pick Casa sulle Botteghe. All the dimly lit and atmospheric rooms are minimalist and mediaeval, with working fireplaces, stone walls and wooden doors. The beds are high enough to fit a chamber pot beneath (there are real flushing toilets in each bedroom now) and have hand-stuffed woollen mattresses.

Packing tips

Dante and Petrarch verses to recite when the mediaeval mood takes over; mountain-friendly shoes and layers.

Also

For the less mobile, some of this rustic site's cobbled steps and grassy slopes might be tricky to navigate.

Pet‐friendly

Pets are allowed at no extra cost. Just let the hotel know when booking. See more pet-friendly hotels in Abruzzo.

Children

Cots and extra beds are provided free. Babysitting with a local nanny costs €15 an hour (give a day’s notice).

Food and Drink

Photos Sextantio Albergo Diffuso food and drink

Top Table

Close to the huge fireplace when the mountain temperature drops.

Dress Code

Humble hemp and cotton to match the ancient earthen surroundings.

Hotel restaurant

The hotel's private dining room, Locanda Sotto gli Archi, serves Abruzzese cuisine in a rustic 16th-century building. Lunch and dinner must be arranged with the hotel in advance, but it's worth thinking ahead if you want to try their traditional antipasti such as pork liver salami, prosciutto and the freshest ricotta. The speciality pasta of the area is also rustled up in the kitchens: strips of chitarrini are made using a guitar-shaped tool to shape the pasta sheets. A breakfast spread of home-made pastries, tarts and cakes is laid out in the bar every morning.

Hotel bar

Head to La Cantinone in the cosy wine cellar for aperitifs and antipasti. If the local red doesn’t take your fancy, the digestifs will: try the bitter herb-based genziana, or the sweet cherry ratafia. There’s also the Liquorificio, where a selection of local liqueurs are offered, as well as benches with digestifs dotted around the communal areas.

Last orders

Breakfast from 8am until 10.30am. Lunch and dinner are available in the hotel's private dining room, but must be arranged in advance with the hotel. The bar shuts at 11pm.

Room service

None.

Location

Photos Sextantio Albergo Diffuso location
Address
Sextantio Albergo Diffuso
Via Principe Umberto
Santo Stefano di Sessanio
67020
Italy

Planes

The nearest airport is Rome Ciampino, reached from the UK with Ryanair (www.ryanair.com). The hotel is around 120km away, roughly an hour and a half by car. The drive from Fuimicino should take around two hours.

Trains

The closest rail station is 25km away in L’Aquila. From here Trenitalia (www.trenitalia.com) operates services to other cities in Italy, via a change in Terni.

Automobiles

Sextantio Albergo Diffuso is in the middle of the Gran Sasso and Monti della Laga National Park, a 90-minute north-east drive from Rome. There’s free parking at the hotel.

Other

The hotel particularly recommend arriving by bus from Rome's Tiburtina station.

Worth getting out of bed for

The hotel has a guide on hand to take guests birdwatching in the national park, with sightings of hawks, eagles and buzzards on offer. Bread-making classes are available on demand; participants can learn how to use a wood-burning oven from the 16th century to make crisp pizza bases and fresh bread. There are also classes revealing the secrets of Abruzzese cuisine.

Local restaurants

Try Tra le Braccia di Morfeo (+39 (0)862 899110) for traditional dishes made with regional ingredients in a setting that’s half-restaurant, half-gallery (with local craftwork for sale). La Locanda sul Lago (+39 (0)862 899019; www.lalocandasullago.it) is a small inn at the bottom of the village, with views of the lake and Santo Stefano and hearty mountain food, such as the region’s classic lentil soup and lamb reared on a nearby plateau.

Reviews

Photos Sextantio Albergo Diffuso reviews
Dan Vernon

Anonymous review

By Dan Vernon, Bafta bagger

Two or three times a month I create a romantic meal for Mrs Smith – a few candles, a more-than-decent bottle of wine, and the best I can muster in the kitchen. It’s a way of shrugging off our day-to-day familiarity – but it has never worked this well before. As I arrange the culatello di Zibello on a platter, Mrs Smith stands close, clutching her glass with a mischievous grin. ‘Now, tell me,’ she says, once we’re seated and clinking glasses to our impending trip. ‘What’s this Tantric sex hotel you’re taking me to?’

‘Oh, it’s a surprise darling,’ I mutter. Taking a long sip of wine, I begin rummaging through my mind – in much the same way one tears up a hotel room when a passport goes missing – trying to work out where she might have got this idea. Ah, it’s the name: Sextantio Albergo Diffuso. The hotel is in Santo Stefano di Sessanio, a 16th-century village some 4,000 feet up in the mountains of Abruzzo. (Sextantio is in fact the Latin name for Sessanio.) This eyrie is only 65 miles or so from Rome, but having departed the city late in the afternoon – just in time to get caught up in rush hour – we arrive well after 10pm, and we despair of finding a bite to eat. The only sign of life in the village – a tight cluster of mediaeval houses crowned with a chess-rook tower – is a candlelit window. Peering in, we find ourselves greeted by a waiter, the very charismatic Massimo, who has stayed up to welcome us with open arms.

Using my feeble Italian, I order a snack. Next thing, a seemingly never-ending procession of dishes is coming our way from the kitchen – seven courses in all. We weren’t that hungry, but how can I tactfully stem this flood of food? Remember the Monty Python sketch where John Cleese is a chef so offended he whips out a machete while the maître d’ impales himself on the client’s fork? Clearly the smartest thing to do is to keep on eating: why ruin dinner?

As for Mrs Smith, so far, so good. She is transported by the mediaeval dining room, which has stout timbers crisscrossing the ceiling, thick, half-wagon-wheel arches, and a fireplace a man could stand in. (These, I think, are the missing ingredients back home.) The wine is from a vineyard dating back to Roman times, and the food is so fresh it is practically still growing on our plates. The repast induces a glow that is further fanned by our bedroom, a 12th-century stone grotto with a few mod cons, among them heated floorboards and a luxurious Philippe Starck bath. ‘And there’s not even a TV to break the spell,’ says Mrs Smith.

In Italian, albergo diffuso means a hotel that is scattered among a number of buildings. In Sextantio’s case, the hotel rooms are individual houses, but there’s more to it than that: the owner of the hotel, the Sextantio Company, has more or less adopted Santo Stefano di Sessanio as an archaeological project.

At one time, Santo Stefano was so prosperous from the wool trade that it provided a quarter of the revenue of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. But when entrepreneur turned hotelier Daniele Kihlgren first came here, the village’s population was down to 70, its infrastructure crumbling fast. Kihlgren’s motto is ‘development without construction’, which means turning traditional houses into accommodation without tarting them up, but also avoiding the sort of reverence for the past that would turn them into period sets. No luxury hotel guest really wants to go back to the 16th century, hence the Starck tub – an inspired touch. Kihlgren has also restored some of the public buildings and furnished them in period style, and has concluded an agreement with the local council to preserve the surrounding countryside against villa construction – which he calls an Italian first.

Breakfast is served in the erstwhile house of the shepherd master, where we find a table laid as though for a royal banquet: fresh ricotta and pecorino cheese, prosciutto, chorizo, homebaked cakes and frittata, with a roaring fireplace the perfect backdrop. Our days are happily spent getting lost in the village’s maze of alleys and walking through the Campo Imperatore (alpine meadows), where the only thing that breaks the silence is a cowbell or two. There are a few small shops that sell local products: mountain cheese, massive loaves, salami, little jars of wild saffron, jam, honey and local liqueurs of plums and berries. At the tisaneria we sample infusions of blueberry and saffron and nibble on lacy biscuits made in a waffle iron.

Dinner the second evening is at the inexpensive, family-run Tra le Braccia di Morfeo, where you can’t go wrong. The bruschetta in particular is in a league of its own. Ever tried mincing garlic and celery with olive oil, then spreading it on toast? I hate celery but this dish changed my mind – a definite contender for the menu back at Casa Smith. Mrs Smith is so enchanted with the atmosphere that she forgets about the Tantra. Instead, she adopts a new mantra: ‘When are we going back?’

 

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Price per night from $120.98