The phrase albergo diffuso might not yet be entirely familiar to English-speaking travelers — or, for that matter, to Italian ones — but the concept that it denotes is one we imagine will quickly catch on. Call it a “distributed hotel” if that makes it clearer — or just take Sassi di Matera as an example. The village of Matera, in far southern Italy, is famous for the houses carved into the volcanic hillsides, some of them dating back to Paleolithic times.
An ordinary hotelier might have built a traditional inn somewhere in town, to offer some proximity to the village’s famous sights. Not Daniele Kihlgren, whose albergo diffuso concept — see also Sextantio — is one of total immersion. Here the hotel rooms occupy the caves themselves — needless to say the look is not exactly frilly or delicate, and the décor is untraditional, to say the least.
What separates Sassi di Matera from merely sleeping in a cave is a certain dedication to luxury, if not quite an ordinary version of it. Your bathroom may be a bare rock cavern, but you can trust in your Milanese host’s taste in fixtures and fittings: your bathtub is the finest money can buy. Prehistoric man might never have ventured outside the caves if they had bathrooms like these.
In the end it’s a concept that might only work in Italy, where respect for history is tempered by the reality of living with it every day. We’d like to see more of this sort of sensitive and creative development. It’s probably too much to ask for an albergo diffuso at Machu Picchu, for example — but after a night or two at Sassi di Matera you might begin thinking along these same lines.
author watson@mouselink.net, source www.tablethotels.com