Best hotels in Italian Riviera | A Curated Visual Guide to Top Stays

Welcome to PressBeyond, the ultimate curated visual guide for design-driven hotels! My name is Will Miller and these are my recommendations for the best boutique and luxury hotels in Italian Riviera.

I am the founder of PressBeyond and I am an ultra-meticulous hotel curator who loves clean visuals. I have individually analyzed and tiered each hotel included in this guide based on a variety of criteria (architecture & design, location, brand & brand affiliation, existing reviews, and my own personal experiences), and importantly, I have hand-selected the leading imagery for each hotel to provide you with easily-digestible, yet detailed and complete, like-for-like, high-level visual profiles. I felt this summarization step was a critical missing piece across existing guides, blogs, and booking platforms. My aim is to make it easier for people to identify hotel environments that resonate with them, along with enabling them to visualize the types of social experiences that those environments help foster. My brain doesn't work when exposed to cluttered content, so my goal was to create the opposite.

Underneath this, we are also a full booking engine offering 5% Venmo cash back along with other exclusive perks. For all of you design-obsessed hotel enthusiasts out there, I hope this guide helps get you to where you see yourself!

An Overview of the Boutique & Luxury Hotel Landscape in Italian Riviera

The Ligurian coast operates on a vertical logic: everything worth having is either perched on a cliff or lapped by water, and the hotels that understand this geography best are the ones that surrender to it rather than fight it. Nowhere is this clearer than Portofino, where the Belmond pair — the hillside Splendido and its harbor-facing satellite, Splendido Mare — occupy what is arguably the most choreographed hotel relationship on the Italian coast. The original Splendido, a former monastery converted into a hotel in the early twentieth century, sits above the village in a garden of umbrella pines, its yellow-ochre facade catching the afternoon light in a way that feels almost theatrical. Splendido Mare, down at the waterfront piazzetta, functions as its more social counterpart — aperitivo tables spilling toward the moored yachts, the whole arrangement suggesting that Portofino was designed as a stage set, not a fishing village. The Eight Hotel Portofino, also in the village, pitches itself at a younger, more design-forward traveler, though it operates at the same financial altitude. Santa Margherita Ligure, a short drive around the headland, offers a different mood entirely. The Grand Hotel Miramare has anchored the waterfront promenade there since 1903, its Liberty-style architecture — the Italian variant of Art Nouveau — giving it a faded grandeur that feels genuinely earned rather than manufactured. The interiors retain period detailing that more aggressively renovated properties have long since stripped out, and the garden terraces descend toward the sea in a sequence of levels that rewards slow movement. Between Portofino and Santa Margherita, the small bay of Paraggi holds the Eight Hotel Paraggi, whose appeal is almost entirely positional: the beach at Paraggi is one of the few sandy stretches on this otherwise rocky coast, and the hotel's proximity to it explains much of its pricing. At the western edge of the Riviera, Sanremo occupies a different cultural register altogether — closer to the French border, more overtly Belle Époque in character, and somewhat removed from the Portofino circuit that drives most international attention. The Royal Hotel San Remo, set in palm-studded grounds with a pool that predates most of the region's contemporary hotel infrastructure, is a period piece in the best sense: a grand nineteenth-century resort hotel that has survived intact enough to make the argument that continuity, sometimes, is its own form of design intelligence.

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Grand Hotel Miramare

Italian Riviera • Santa Margherita Ligure • OVER THE TOP

avg. $1,309 / night

Includes $69 / night in cash back

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LHW Leaders Club property

Grand Hotel Miramare Design Editorial

White stucco and sea-green shutters have marked this stretch of Santa Margherita Ligure's waterfront since the Grand Hotel Miramare opened in 1903, its five-storey Belle Époque facade — wrought-iron balustrades, ornamental plasterwork, colonnaded ground-floor loggia — positioned directly above the Ligurian shoreline with the calculated confidence of an era that understood the grand hotel as civic statement. Stone-pine canopies frame the upper floors in the images exactly as they have for more than a century, the building's white mass sitting against the hillside vegetation with an assurance that more recent coastal architecture rarely achieves. Inside, two registers coexist without much friction. The older rooms carry inlaid parquet floors in a geometric checker pattern, Murano glass chandeliers, wrought-iron bedheads with scrollwork detailing, and marble bathrooms with pedestal basins — the full inheritance of Ligurian grand-hotel tradition. Newer accommodation pulls the palette toward warm taupe, introduces plain oak flooring and cove-lit diamond-relief wallcovering, and reads as a calibrated rather than transformative update. The pool terrace is the property's clearest success: a large outdoor pool edged in timber decking and ringed with cream-canopied loungers, palm trees reflected in still water with the Gulf of Tigullio opening beyond. The poolside dining room — floor-to-ceiling glazing, iron café chairs in teal-and-cream stripe — keeps that view in frame from every table across the hotel's 82 rooms.

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Splendido Mare, A Belmond Hotel - Image 1

Splendido Mare, A Belmond Hotel - Image 2

Splendido Mare, A Belmond Hotel - Image 3

Splendido Mare, A Belmond Hotel

Italian Riviera • Portofino • OVER THE TOP

avg. $2,670 / night

Includes $141 / night in cash back

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Splendido Mare, A Belmond Hotel Design Editorial

Pressed against the harbour wall of one of the world's most scrutinised piazzas, where the ochre and terracotta facades of Portofino's fishing village have drawn painters, film stars, and the European aristocracy since the nineteenth century, Splendido Mare A Belmond Hotel claims the most coveted address in the village itself. While its sister property, the original Hotel Splendido, commands the hillside above from a converted monastery, Splendido Mare is embedded within the piazzetta — a position that makes every arriving motorboat and departing yacht part of the daily theatre. The restaurant terrace, canopied in yellow and white stripes and framed by clipped box hedges in terracotta pots, functions less as a dining room than as the finest ringside seat on the Ligurian coast. The interiors, refreshed under Belmond's ongoing investment in the property, carry a restrained mid-century Italian domesticity — herringbone and parquet timber floors, barrel-vaulted ceilings with delicate gilt-line detailing, upholstered rattan chairs, and walnut-framed headboards paired with rose and wheat-toned blankets. Murano glass wall sconces and a chandelier of the same provenance illuminate the dark-panelled cocktail bar, its mirrored back shelf and leather barstools giving it the clubbable gravity of a Milanese drinking room transplanted to the sea. Throughout, the palette holds to warm cream and sand, letting the harbour light — and the view — carry the chromatic weight.

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Splendido, A Belmond Hotel

Italian Riviera • Portofino • OVER THE TOP

avg. $2,994 / night

Includes $158 / night in cash back

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Splendido, A Belmond Hotel Design Editorial

Perched on the hillside above Portofino's harbor, a former Benedictine monastery that dates to the sixteenth century was transformed over subsequent centuries into a private villa before becoming, in 1901, the hotel that would define the Ligurian Riviera's particular strain of aristocratic ease. Splendido, A Belmond Hotel, cascades down the terraced hillside in successive levels of salmon-washed stucco, iron-railed balconies dense with bougainvillea and wisteria, the massing less monumental than intimate — a grand house that happens to have grown larger over time. From the open-air restaurant terrace, iron bistro chairs and white-clothed tables frame one of the most recognizable views in Italian hospitality: the wooded promontory and bobbing masts of the harbor below, pinned between maritime pine and the silver-blue Ligurian Sea. The interiors move between two registers. In the more recently refreshed suites, walls washed in soft peach carry gilded Baroque headboards and Murano glass chandeliers draped with florals, the effect an unapologetic celebration of Italianate grandeur, daybeds in buttercup-yellow brocade positioned to catch the sea light through French-shuttered doors. In the standard guestrooms, the palette quiets to ivory and sage, Murano fittings scaled back to a single candelabra chandelier, parquet floors grounding the lightness of embroidered floral bed runners and brass wall sconces. The infinity pool, cut into the lower garden terrace, dissolves at its edge into a view of cypress, umbrella pine, and the faint line of the open sea.

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Royal Hotel San Remo

Italian Riviera • Sanremo • SPLURGE

avg. $381 / night

Includes $20 / night in cash back

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LHW Leaders Club property

Royal Hotel San Remo Design Editorial

Since 1872, a white Belle Époque palace on the Ligurian waterfront has defined what a grand Italian Riviera hotel should look like — five symmetrical stories of ornate rendered facades, green-shuttered French doors opening onto iron balustrades, the whole composition rising from terraced gardens dense with Norfolk Island pines and Canary Island date palms. The Royal Hotel San Remo was built by the Lorenzi family and has remained in private hands ever since, a continuity that explains why the property carries itself with the unhurried confidence of an aristocratic residence rather than a managed asset. The interiors hold two distinct registers in productive tension. The original rooms favour herringbone parquet, marquetry writing desks, damask curtains in gold and sage, and Louis XVI-style medallion chairs — the full vocabulary of nineteenth-century grand hotel comfort, handled without apology. A later wing shifts to bleached louvered panels, striped linen armchairs, and a cooler palette of sand and pale blue that lets the Ligurian sunset do the decorative work. The dining room bridges both periods, its coffered ceiling carrying hand-painted botanical frescoes above gold-swagged drapery and white-clothed tables set with crystal. Outside, a seawater pool carved from the natural rock steps down through flagstone terraces to the private beach — one of the most convincing stretches of Italian resort infrastructure anywhere on this coast.

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Eight Hotel Paraggi

Italian Riviera • Paraggi • OVER THE TOP

avg. $1,114 / night

Includes $59 / night in cash back

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Eight Hotel Paraggi Design Editorial

Paraggi's tiny protected cove, wedged between Portofino and Santa Margherita Ligure along one of the most contested stretches of Ligurian coastline, has for decades drawn the kind of discretion-seeking visitors who prefer their Riviera without the theatre. Eight Hotel Paraggi works with that instinct — a five-storey liberty-style palazzo on the main road through the village paired with a separate beach pavilion right at the waterline, the two structures together forming a property that feels simultaneously inland Italian and completely of the sea. The facade, warm cream stucco with dark shuttered windows and a vintage Fiat 600 parked at the entrance as if it had never moved, carries the unhurried atmosphere of a private residence that simply grew into a hotel. The interiors take their cue from the same controlled restraint. Guest rooms in the main building use draped fabric canopies suspended from the ceiling in place of conventional bed surrounds — a theatrical gesture softened by pale oak floors, lacquered millwork in warm taupe, and striped textile accents in dusty red and blue that echo the Ligurian maritime palette. The beach restaurant, its coffered bamboo ceiling and full-width glazing opening directly onto the cove, sets taupe upholstered seating against white marble-topped tables, the Ligurian water doing most of the decorative work. At dusk, rattan lanterns placed among the sunloungers on the private sand mark the point where hotel design gives way entirely to place.

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Eight Hotel Portofino

Italian Riviera • Portofino • OVER THE TOP

avg. $1,241 / night

Includes $65 / night in cash back

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Hilton Honors™ property

Eight Hotel Portofino Design Editorial

Tucked into the car-free lanes of Santa Margherita Ligure, just minutes from Portofino's famous harbor by water taxi or the hotel's own electric buggy, Eight Hotel Portofino makes a persuasive case that intimacy is its own form of luxury. The property is set within a pale stucco building typical of the Ligurian riviera townscape — shuttered windows, molded cornices, the cobblestone mosaic entry threshold visible in the forecourt — converted into a small, design-forward hotel whose identity is built on carefully curated interiors rather than grand architectural gesture. Inside, two distinct moods coexist. The established rooms carry a restrained contemporary register: warm timber floors, panel-molded white joinery, cream upholstered armchairs grouped around low lacquered tables, and large-format black-and-white portrait photography mounted flush to greige-toned walls. The newer suite configurations shift the palette decisively toward Riviera warmth — powder blue paneling borrowed from the Ligurian sky, walnut and brass open-shelf room dividers creating a soft boundary between sleeping and living zones, and terracotta-upholstered daybeds that pick up the amber of the oak flooring below. The dining room strikes its own note: emerald velvet barrel chairs around slate-topped tables, striped silk curtains puddling onto cherry-wood floors, and a circular convex mirror anchoring the buffet wall in a move that feels more Milanese apartment than resort breakfast room. Access to a private beach club on the bay completes the picture.