Italy

6 records and not one of them resembles the rest of this register. Four sit on the Heritage shelf: a monastery island in the Venetian lagoon that was a quarantine station and an asylum before it was a hotel, an Aeolian outcrop, a Sardinian rock, a villa colony on a Corsican island the French administer.

Genuine private islands barely exist in Italian waters, and the scarcity is itself the fact. What is sold here is separation from a crowded shore rather than isolation: the city is minutes away by boat, and in August the water is busy with vessels that answer to nobody.

The buildings do the work. These are conversions of things built for other purposes, and the register describes what the building was rather than letting the architecture speak alone.

Season is short and honest. Most close for half the year; the ones that do not are in the lagoon, where winter is the better season and the register says so.