Michelin Keys 2026: the 17 Italian hotels with three keys, and the 4 new names

Italy has 224 hotels with Michelin Keys in the 2026 selection published on 18 September. No other country in Europe has more, and only the United States has more worldwide. Seventeen of them hold three keys, the guide’s highest distinction for a hotel, and four of the seventeen are new this year: Borgo Santandrea on the Amalfi Coast, Collegio alla Querce in Florence, the Splendido in Portofino and Airelles Palladio in Venice, which also took the guide’s Opening of the Year award. Here is the full list, what changed, and what a key measures.

The numbers behind the 224

The Italian count breaks down as 17 hotels with three keys, 49 with two and 158 with one. Six hotels are new at two keys and 34 are new at one. Worldwide the guide now lists 155 three-key hotels, 657 with two and 2,020 with one, so Italy holds roughly one in nine of the top tier. The keys are awarded by the same inspectors who award the stars, on five criteria the guide publishes: the hotel as an architectural and design object, the quality of service, its personality, its value for the price and its contribution to the place around it. A key is not a star for the restaurant downstairs, and several of the seventeen have no starred kitchen at all.

The 17 Italian hotels with three Michelin Keys

Airelles Palladio: three keys and Opening of the Year in one go

The Venice result is the story of the selection. Two prizes, one hotel. Airelles, the French group behind Les Airelles in Courchevel and the Château de Versailles hotel, chose the Giudecca for its first house outside France: 17 rooms, 28 suites and a three-bedroom villa, looking across the canal to St Mark’s. The restaurants explain part of the verdict. abc kitchens is Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s first restaurant in Italy, Matsuhisa Venice is the first Matsuhisa in the country, Villa Frollo is cooked by Norbert Niederkofler, and Cédric Grolet runs a pastry buffet at 95 euros a head, 130 with a glass of Champagne. Michelin gave the hotel three keys at its first appearance and named it Opening of the Year, one of four special awards worldwide, for offering a new way of looking at the city, from the far side of the water and away from the crowds. Venice now has three of Italy’s seventeen, and two of them, the Palladio and the Cipriani, stand on the same island.

The other three promotions

Borgo Santandrea, opened in 2022 on the cliffs at Conca dei Marini, just west of Amalfi, with its own beach at the foot of the rock, moves up to join Il San Pietro as the Amalfi Coast’s two three-key addresses. Collegio alla Querce, the Auberge Collection’s conversion of a Renaissance villa that spent its later life as a boarding school, on the hill above Florence with 83 rooms, 34 of them suites, opened in 2025 and is now level with the Four Seasons in the city. The Splendido in Portofino, the Belmond hotel in a former monastery above the harbour, moves up to three, and its sister at the harbour, Splendido Mare, takes two in the same selection.

What else moved: Villa d’Este, The Carlton, Villa Treville

The six new two-key hotels include five names our readers know. Villa d’Este at Cernobbio takes two keys, three days before we priced its four private villas. The Carlton, Milan, the Rocco Forte hotel off Via della Spiga, takes two. Villa Treville, the terraced villas above Positano, and Masseria Torre Maizza, Rocco Forte’s masseria at Savelletri di Fasano in Puglia, complete the group with Splendido Mare. The full Italian list, with the 158 one-key hotels, is on the guide’s Italian site.

How to read the list

Three things stand out. First, size: most of the seventeen are small houses, and the largest, the Cipriani, the Four Seasons Firenze and the San Domenico, are grand hotels of a type that no longer gets built. Second, geography: Venice has three, Florence two, the Amalfi Coast two, the Tuscan countryside two, and Lake Como, Portofino, Capri, Rome, Civita di Bagnoregio, Umbria, Modena and Taormina one each, while Milan, Turin, Naples and Sardinia have none at the top level. Third, ownership: nine of the seventeen belong to seven international groups, Belmond, Four Seasons, Rosewood, Auberge, Aman, Airelles and Bulgari, and eight are family or independent houses, from Passalacqua and Il San Pietro to Casa Maria Luigia, which is Massimo Bottura’s guesthouse outside Modena. That balance is the Italian distinction. In most countries the top tier is a list of brands.

The Luxury.it perspective

The keys are in their third year and are already doing what the stars did for restaurants: turning a private judgment into a public ranking that hotels will spend money to climb. The Italian list is, on the whole, right. Passalacqua, Il San Pietro, the Splendido and the Cipriani are the hotels a Milanese would name unprompted, and the four promotions make sense on the ground. What the list cannot measure is the season. A three-key hotel on the Amalfi Coast in August and the same hotel in the last week of October are two different products at two different prices, and the second is usually the better one. Use the seventeen as a shortlist, then use the calendar. Our guides to Lake Como, Tuscany and Sicily cover the shoulder weeks hotel by hotel.

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