Castello di Montegridolfo

A castle hotel on a hilltop overlooking the Le Marche/Emilia-Romagna border near Cattolica, Italy

This mighty hilltop hamlet, one in a string of defensive strongholds set high above the rumpled quilt of golden and green hills where Emilia-Romagna and Le Marche meet, has seen its share of pitched battles.

Founded sometime around AD 1000, Montegridolfo was rebuilt after a particularly violent confrontation between rival city-states Rimini and Urbino in 1336. Today, this site originally chosen for its ease of defense offers visitors panoramic views, an atmospherically austere setting, and an escape from the hurly-burly of Pesaro and the beach resorts of the nearby Adriatic coast.

The only roads to Montegridolfo switchback endlessly up into the mountains, and the only access into the castle-like historic center itself is up a steeply curving stone bridge that ducks through a double gate under the clock tower.

The castle-hamlet

Though a bit over-restored, the fortified village is gorgeous by any measure. A rough ellipse of defensive walls encircles the town’s three streets, and the buildings are made of bricks in varying shades of pale red, yellow, and gray lending everything a mottled, Indian corn look.

The main square sprouts a few shade trees and is flanked by a tiny chapel, a guard tower (now a bar/gelateria), a wall niche with a revered 17th-century papier-mâché Madonna, and the town hall-cum-post office for the ten or so families who still live here and share their town with the hotel that now owns about half the property.

Guest quarters at Castello di Montegridolfo

Though it’s all a single operation, the lodgings are split among four main options.

• Posh Palazzo Viviani, the main manor house, offers eight deluxe rooms with antique furniture and décor—some slathered in frescoes, others with an amazing cobweb of ceiling beams—starting at €75 in the off season (but as high as €250 in summer—more for fancy suites).
• The eight apartments scattered throughout the surrounding Borgo Antico (old village) are spacious, comfortable, and blandly contemporary with a few antique accents; rates are €55–€150.
• The seven simple, rustic rooms of the Casa del Pittore—the bargain of the bunch at €55–€100—are in an old outbuilding just beyond the town walls, surrounded by trees and birdsong and overlooking a swimming pool and the countryside below.
• Beyond that, down a path lined by lavender and cherry trees, lies the least atmospheric option, the Borgo Nuovo, or Borgo degli Ulivi, a nucleus of buildings built in 2002 as a modern take on a traditional village, its 30 suites intended more for hosting small conventions than housing passing tourists; rates are €55–€150.

Most people prefer to stay in one of the first two options, in the Borgo Antico, where the buildings are picked out with aged shutters, window boxes spill blooms, and shingles hang outside the cheese and sundries shops and the restaurants.

Meals at Castello di Montegridolfo

There’s a lovely breakfast room in an old aranceto (winter greenhouse for citrus trees), where guests of all the lodgings gather for an ample morning buffet, but most of the other dining options operate as if they were independent restaurants.

There’s the high-end Ristoro di Palazzo Viviani in the main palazzo’s stony cellar, where dining is accompanied by live piano music and silver candelabrum on the crisp tablecloths.

For lighter fare, La Grotta dei Gridolfi is a basement enoteca (wine bar) serving pizzas, panini, and (on Friday and Saturday nights) live music, but the best option is Osteria dell’Accademia, a homey trattoria offering filling dishes and brilliant valley views over the hills where Emilia-Romagna and Le Marche meet.

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