Conero Golf Club

Few Italian golf courses enjoy a setting quite like this one. Conero Golf Club sits on the Conero Riviera, the dramatic headland south of Ancona where limestone cliffs plunge into some of the clearest Adriatic water in Italy. The Conero promontory — a protected natural park — gives the course its name and its dominant backdrop, a landscape of dense holm oak forest, wild rosemary, and sudden sea views that make it genuinely unlike anything in the country's better-known golfing regions.

The course winds through the hillside terrain between Sirolo and the park's interior, where elevation changes and Mediterranean scrub create natural definition between holes. This is not a manicured resort product but a course shaped by the land it occupies, with tight lines and a premium on local knowledge. The Adriatic light is extraordinary here, particularly in the late afternoon, and the seasons are mild enough that golf is playable well into autumn.

Sirolo itself is a small, beautifully preserved hilltop village, genuinely popular with Italian vacationers rather than an international tourist circuit — which gives a round here a distinctly local character, far from the groomed spectacle of Tuscany's more famous clubs.