The Best Golf Courses in Italy

The Italian islands offer the most theatrical golf in the country. At the Verdura Golf & Spa Resort on Sicily’s southern coast, the fairways run along the Mediterranean itself, several holes pitched on the cliff edge with the sea filling the horizon. It is a resort of genuine pedigree and a course that asks for nerve as much as length, the wind off the water shaping every approach. A short drive inland and into another world, Picciolo Etna Golf Resort & Spa plays beneath the dark, brooding mass of Mount Etna, the volcanic soil and citrus groves giving it a character found nowhere else in golf.

Sardinia’s calling card is Is Molas Resort Hotel, long regarded as one of Italy’s finest parkland tests. Cradled by pines, eucalyptus and Mediterranean scrub beneath a ring of low mountains, it is a mature, exacting course that has hosted the professionals and still rewards thoughtful, position golf. For the player who wants championship credentials wrapped in island calm, it is hard to better.

No region marries golf and culture quite like Tuscany. La Bagnaia Golf & Spa Resort, set in a vast private estate just outside Siena, offers a rolling, beautifully conditioned course threaded through cypress avenues and olive terraces, with one of central Italy’s loveliest resorts at its heart. It is golf to be savoured slowly, ideally followed by an afternoon in Siena or among the Chianti vineyards.

To the north, near the medieval town of Scarperia in the Mugello, UNA Poggio Dei Medici unfolds across a green valley of vines and woodland. Generous yet shrewdly bunkered, it is a course that flatters and tests in equal measure, and its position makes it an easy partner to Florence. Further south, into the sun of Salento, Acaya Golf Resort brings the game to Puglia’s heel, a modern course laid through ancient olive country near the baroque splendour of Lecce.

Puglia has quietly become one of Italy’s most seductive corners, and golf has followed. Borgo Egnazia, the celebrated resort on the Adriatic coast near Savelletri, is the headline: a place of whitewashed courtyards and Mediterranean glamour, with golf set among ancient olive groves and dunes running down towards the sea. It is as much a destination as a course, the sort of address where you settle in for several days and let the rhythm of long lunches and late dinners take over.

Paired with Acaya in the Salento, Borgo Egnazia anchors a southern itinerary that is golf, food and architecture in equal measure. This is the Italy of trulli towns and masseria estates, of burrata and primitivo, and a tailor-made trip lets you move between the courses and the experiences at your own pace.

Northern Italy offers golf of a different temper, cooler, greener, framed by water and mountains. Chervo Golf Spa & Resort at Pozzolengo, near the southern shore of Lake Garda, is among the most extensive golf resorts in the country, its courses rolling through moraine hills with the Alps as a distant backdrop. Closer to Milan, Le Robinie Golf Resort at Solbiate Olona is a mature, tree-lined course of real quality, an easy and rewarding round for those beginning or ending a journey in the north.

The lakes themselves provide the grandest setting of all. Base yourself at the Grand Hotel des Iles Borromees or the Grand Hotel Bristol in Stresa, with Lake Maggiore and the Borromean Islands at your feet, or at the Albergo Terminus on the waterfront in Como, and golf becomes one pleasure among many, threaded between boat days, lakeside dinners and the slow, beautiful theatre of the Italian lakes.