World’s 50 Best Hotels 2026: Passalacqua No.5, 6 Italian hotels in the top 50

Passalacqua is the fifth best hotel in the world for 2026, according to the list announced in Paris. The ceremony was held on 15 September. The 24-room villa at Moltrasio, on the western shore of Lake Como, also took the Best Boutique Hotel award, and it leads an Italian contingent of six hotels in the top 50 and fifteen in the top 100. Rosewood Hong Kong is number one. Italy has the fifth. Here is where every Italian and European hotel landed, what the special awards went to, and how the list lines up with the Michelin Keys published three days later.

The Italian six in the top 50

Passalacqua at 5 is followed by Four Seasons Hotel Firenze at 12, Casa Maria Luigia at 18, Bulgari Hotel Roma at 32, Portrait Milano at 39 and the San Domenico Palace in Taormina at 50. Casa Maria Luigia, the country house that Massimo Bottura and Lara Gilmore run outside Modena, is the year’s highest new entry, which makes it the most talked-about arrival on the list after the winner. The Florentine Four Seasons at 12 is the highest-placed grand hotel in Europe, one place above Claridge’s, and Portrait Milano, the Lungarno Collection’s hotel in the former seminary on Corso Venezia, is the only Milan address in the hundred. Three of the six are in cities and three are not, which is roughly how the whole list divides.

Nine more between 51 and 100

The second half of the list, published earlier in the month and covered in our first piece, holds nine Italian names: Il San Pietro di Positano at 58, the Splendido in Portofino at 60, Castiglion del Bosco at 62, Orient Express La Minerva in Rome at 66, Forestis on the Plose above Bressanone at 68, Borgo Santandrea at 84, Borgo Egnazia at 88, Villa Treville at 91 and Reschio at 95. Fifteen in the hundred. That is the count to remember. France has ten, the United Kingdom has six with Estelle Manor and Gleneagles outside London, and Switzerland has one, Badrutt’s Palace, which took the Art of Hospitality award.

Europe’s top 50: London, Paris and the Riviera

Europe places twenty hotels in the top 50, six of them Italian, and the order tells a story about where the voters have been sleeping. After Passalacqua and the Four Seasons Firenze, Claridge’s is the highest entry at 13, then the Hôtel de Crillon at 14, Le Bristol at 19 and Cheval Blanc Paris at 20. The Four Seasons Astir Palace in Athens is 27, Raffles London at The OWO is 28, Badrutt’s Palace in St. Moritz is 36, and the Hôtel du Couvent in Nice, the former convent that opened in 2024, is 38 with the Art of Design award. The Hôtel de Paris Monte-Carlo is 40, the Plaza Athénée 41, the Sacher in Vienna 42, Estelle Manor in Oxfordshire 43 and the Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc 44. The Connaught closes the European list at 49. Between them, Paris, London and the Riviera account for ten of the twenty.

How the list was made, and where it was announced

The World’s 50 Best Hotels is voted by an academy of travel writers, hoteliers and well-travelled guests, each casting seven votes for hotels they have stayed in during the previous 18 months, and the organisation behind it, now called The 50, is the one that has run The World’s 50 Best Restaurants since 2002. The 2026 ceremony was held in Paris for the first time, on 15 September, which explains the presence of four Paris palaces in the top 20 as much as anything does. The full list is on the50.com. Rosewood Hong Kong is number one, with Capella Bangkok second, the Four Seasons Bangkok at Chao Phraya River third and Atlantis The Royal in Dubai fourth. Asia holds six of the top ten.

Against the Michelin Keys

Three days after the Paris ceremony, Michelin published its 2026 Keys, and the two lists agree more than they differ. Passalacqua, the Four Seasons Firenze, Casa Maria Luigia, Bulgari Roma, San Domenico, Il San Pietro, the Splendido, Castiglion del Bosco, Borgo Santandrea and Reschio all hold three keys, the guide’s top grade; we set out the full list of seventeen Italian three-key hotels this week. The disagreements are as interesting as the overlaps. Five one way, seven the other. Portrait Milano, Orient Express La Minerva, Forestis, Borgo Egnazia and Villa Treville are in the 50 Best hundred but not among Michelin’s seventeen, and Aman Venice, the Cipriani, JK Place Capri, Corte della Maestà, Borgo Santo Pietro, Airelles Palladio and Collegio alla Querce have three keys but no place in the hundred. One list is voted by guests and one is inspected, and a traveller who wants both verdicts now has a shortlist of ten hotels that pass both.

The Luxury.it perspective

The number that matters is fifteen. No other European country puts as many hotels in the hundred, and Italy does it with a mix no one else has: three palace hotels in cities, two villas on a lake and a coast, a farmhouse outside Modena, a mountain lodge, a Puglian masseria and an Umbrian castle. France’s ten are almost all in Paris and on the Riviera; Britain’s six are London and two country houses. The Italian list looks like the country. What it lacks is Venice, and that is the surprise of 2026: the city with two three-key hotels on the Giudecca and an Aman on the Grand Canal has no entry in the hundred, which is a reminder that a voted list reflects where its voters have recently stayed. Passalacqua at 5, meanwhile, was number one in the list’s first edition in 2023 and second in 2024, in a house of 24 rooms that opened in 2022. We wrote about its rooms and suites earlier this month, and after 15 September the waiting list will not get shorter.

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