Ah, the lure of islands! Naturally romantic places, these spots of sea-encircled land offer a natural sense of escape. An island is a little world of its own where you can feel beyond the reach of workaday mainland concerns. It’s no surprise that many holiday dreams feature islands. Many holiday home dreams feature them too.
Intimacy is part of any island’s appeal, but so too is a unique identity. Islands are very distinctive places where traditions, languages and wildlife have evolved in their own way. Islands are often ‘special’. For leisure travellers, they have also often seemed a bit ‘exclusive’, because it was traditionally harder to reach them without, say, your own yacht. Even now when several Italian islands can be reached by direct flights from the UK and are therefore every bit as accessible as mainland destinations, their aura of discerning luxuriousness lingers.
SPOILT FOR CHOICE
It would take you a very long time to visit all of Italy’s islands. Because there are about 450 of them. They include well-known day-tripper favourites such as Capri and Venice, remote luxury getaways such as the Aeolian Islands and Pantelleria, dainty little isles very few non-Italians have ever heard of, and big internationally loved destinations such as Sardinia and Sicily. Given the sheer number of island options out there and the limited space available here, you’ll understand why we’ll be focussing mainly on the two biggest islands, Sardinia and Sicily, in this article.
But first some general points on buying property on any Italian island. Note that such locations
