The Mediterranean, for certain travellers, is best understood as an atlas of small seas linked by short boats. For these travellers we design what we call the island weeks — small itineraries that live on the water, move gently between harbours, and ask very little of the traveller beyond patience and a good book.
Two of our favourites this year.
The Cyclades, privately
Paros, Antiparos, Folegandros, Amorgos, Milos — a chain of islands small enough to be crossed in half a day on a private gulet. We begin, often, on Antiparos: a quiet house on the eastern cove, a private cook, two or three days to settle. The boat takes us, then, down to Folegandros, which has so far refused to become famous; to Amorgos, which still belongs mostly to itself; and to Milos’s empty western coves. The itinerary works best across ten to twelve days in late May or the first week of July.
The Aeolians and the western Sicilian coast
A less-travelled Italian archipelago. We like to begin in Salina, the greenest of the Aeolians, with a house above the cliffs and a week of small dinners on a private terrace. The boat takes us, then, through Stromboli at dusk (a volcano is a good dinner companion), across to the western coast of Sicily, to the small harbour of Favignana and the old tuna island of Marettimo. A country of small ports, private beaches, and the kind of fish that rewards an unhurried table.
Both of these journeys work only with the right boat and the right captain. We charter small — thirty or forty metres — with a cook who knows where the good produce lands and a captain who knows, importantly, where the quiet anchorages are. The route is planned before departure but redrawn daily around weather and mood. The morning you wake wanting to stay, we stay.
The Mediterranean in small archipelagos, on a private boat, is one of the few luxury travel ideas that has not been diluted by imitation. It is still, as it was for the families who invented the summer cruise a hundred years ago, one of the most complete ways to spend a week.
