LOCATION

You don’t need an explanation for Ferrara. You get it.
There are cities that welcome you with noise, traffic, crowds, signs everywhere, and someone selling you something on every corner. Ferrara does the opposite. It waits for you. It learned to do that over five centuries of history, and it hasn’t lost the habit.
It’s a city that knows it’s beautiful without having to prove it. Tourists come here and leave amazed that they didn’t think of it sooner. At eight in the morning, the people of Ferrara ride their bikes along the medieval walls, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. And maybe it is.
Because Ferrara
has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1995, both for its Renaissance-era historic center and for the Po Delta: Ferrara is one of the best-preserved cities in Italy. Palazzo dei Diamanti, the Estense Walls, and the Addizione Erculea designed in 1492—these aren’t artifacts in a glass display case. They are the city. People walk among them every day.
Castello Estense stands there, in the middle of the square, as if it were nothing special. And indeed, nothing has changed: in Ferrara, history and the present coexist in the same space, each in its own place.
The cuisine here is the kind you don’t expect and you don’t forget: pumpkin cappellacci, salama da sugo, Coppia IGP cheese, and torta tenerina. This is an Estense culinary tradition that goes back centuries and has no pretensions of being touristy. People eat well here because they have always eaten well here, plain and simple.
Why now?
Because mass tourism has made it increasingly difficult to live in certain cities—Venice, Florence, the Cinque Terre. Ferrara has not yet succumbed to that trend. You can still get lost in an alley without coming across a souvenir shop. You can still make a reservation at the Palazzo dei Diamanti without having to wait in line. You can still feel like you’re in a real city, not just a representation of it.
It won’t last forever: Beautiful things are always discovered. But right now, at this very moment, Ferrara is still very much there. Authentic, accessible, surprising.
Because from here…
We’ve been in Piazza Repubblica, in front of the Estense Castle, since 1990. Not as observers, but as part of the city. We know which restaurants are truly worth a visit and which ones are just coasting. We know when to visit the Po Delta to see the flamingos. We know Tresigallo, we know Flamingo Hiking, and we know the producers you won’t find in any guidebook.
When you stay at the Annunziata, you don’t just have a room in the historic center. You get a perspective on Ferrara: the perspective of someone who lives there every day and who has never stopped finding it interesting.
That’s the difference between arriving in a city and truly experiencing it.