What follows is not a summons to worship, but a massage in what was once an 11th-century convent. I shrug off my robe—not clerical, but fluffy and white—and let my slippers fall to the stone floor.
Face down, inhaling the scent of lavender gathered from gardens once tended by Benedictine nuns, I am quickly divested of any Catholic guilt and surrender to the intoxicating duality of Castel Badia. Opened late last year, it’s a luxury hotel co-steered by famed hotelier Aldo Melpignano, who’s behind properties like the Borgo Egnazia in Puglia.
This interweaving of austerity and indulgence is not unusual in Italy, where monasteries, convents, and abbeys are currently being recast as some of the continent’s most atmospheric hotels. Cloisters lead to cocktail bars, refectories become restaurants. Their appeal lies in the frisson that comes from inhabiting spaces built for renunciation and giving oneself over—not to penance or confession, but to stillness and comfort.
The symbolism of these places is familiar to me. With an Irish mother and Italian father, I grew up between the pious cadence of Irish Catholicism and the more voracious Italian expression of faith, absorbing its rituals and contradictions.
My uncle, once a Franciscan monk who settled in California, scaled the walls of his monastery to escape to San Francisco with the man who is now his husband. I have always understood that religious spaces can hold devotion and rebellion, confinement and release.
And so I set out on a pilgrimage of my own.
My first stop was Vocabolo Moscatelli, a 12th-century monastery turned boutique design hotel in northern Umbria. The founders, Frederik Kubierschky and Catharina Lütjens, met while working in Zurich, and, over an extensive restoration with architect Jacopo Venerosi Pesciolini, they preserved the structure’s stone fireplaces, exposed beams, and heavy wood lintels while introducing a more playful strain of contemporary Italian design. A hot pink Paola Lenti sofa interrupts the monastic neutrals in my suite.
Meditation takes the form of a dip in the travertine pool or a massage in the former chapel. During an early-evening tasting, I drink an earthy Sagrantino from Paolo Bea, the Umbrian producer who cultivated a devoted following long before the current mania for natural wine.
(There is a local saying that when a pope dies, one opens a bottle of Bea.) The wine is paired with tangy Japanese medlar fruit dusted with cocoa nibs.
Across the Tyrrhenian Sea on the island of Ischia, L’Albergo del Monastero occupies a convent first established by cloistered Clarisse nuns within the Aragonese Castle. The rocky citadel has served as a fortress, prison, convent, artists’ refuge, and, now, an elegant 20-room hotel.
Its white limestone vaults, original façade, and enclosed garden have been soberly preserved by siblings Cristina and Nicola Mattera, whose family history is entwined with the castle. They grew up here, as did their father, the artist Gabriele Mattera, who invited other artists to visit him there and exhibit their work on the premises.
The nuns may have lived in seclusion, but the Matteras have turned the property outward, hosting a lively cultural program through their foundation. The restaurant, too, asks for a small act of surrender: A tasting menu is served according to the chef’s choices.
At breakfast, garden figs, rustic pastries, and ribbons of pink tuna crudo are arranged beneath the pale stone arches. It is an invitation to contemplation, even as vacationers spread colorful towels across the rocks below.
From there I sailed to the Amalfi Coast, where Monastero Santa Rosa appears high above the Gulf of Salerno; its panoramic infinity pool sits beside a former 17th-century Dominican monastery. Here, clerical restraint gives way to romance and la dolce vita.
I am welcomed to my suite with cream-filled sfogliatelle, still prepared according to the nuns’ original recipe. Later, at the spa, I submit to a two-hour treatment called Hora Sexta—Nun’s Escape, named for the noon respite from the midday sun.
By the time I emerge, a heaving, high-summer Positano feels improbably distant. While I’m still refining my own relationship to faith, these ancient abodes have offered a new vision of travel: not as excess, but as permission to retreat from the world without renouncing its pleasures.