Lake Como is the most requested Italian destination for board retreats and senior leadership programmes and the most consistently mishandled. The mishandling takes two forms: the large hotel that hosts the group as one of fifteen other corporate groups occupying the property simultaneously, or the villa hire that provides the setting but not the programme.

The Etna DOC was created in 1968, making it one of Sicily's oldest wine appellations. For most of its history it was a source of undistinguished bulk wine — high-alcohol red produced from the Nerello Mascalese and sold north to augment the Burgundy négociant blends that required colour and body.

Ponza is not undiscovered. It has been continuously inhabited since at least the Bronze Age, used as an imperial Roman exile destination, occupied by the Bourbons of Naples who built the town's characteristic painted fishing port, and has been a summer destination for Roman and Neapolitan families for at least a century.

The Amalfi Coast is one of the three or four most requested incentive destinations in Italy, and one of the most consistently problematic to execute correctly.

The Pontine Islands were not, from the Roman perspective, marginal geography. They were Imperial property, located on the principal maritime route between Rome's port at Ostia and the Campanian coast, and used as places of controlled exile for members of the Julio-Claudian dynasty whose continued existence was politically inconvenient but whose execution would have been symbolically difficult.

The Amalfi Coast is the most discussed stretch of coastline in Italy and among the most discussed in the world. This discussion has been going on, in recognisable form, since the mid-nineteenth century, when the British and German Romantic travellers who invented the concept of the Grand Tour's southern extension decided that the road between Positano and Ravello constituted a category of visual experience that required specific terminology to convey.

The Gulf of Orosei runs along Sardinia's eastern coast between Dorgali in the north and Baunei in the south — approximately 35 kilometres of coastline backed by the Supramonte limestone massif, which drops directly into the sea in vertical and near-vertical cliffs of up to 400 metres.

Sagrantino di Montefalco DOCG is made from a single grape variety — the Sagrantino — grown exclusively in a small zone of approximately 700 hectares around the hilltop town of Montefalco in the Valle Umbra, between Spoleto and Perugia.

The Val d'Orcia is the most photographed agricultural landscape in Italy and possibly in Europe. The photographs — the cypress alleys rising from bare clay slopes, the isolated farmhouse on a ridge against a grey and ochre sky, the road through green wheat fields in early May — have circulated so widely that the landscape has become slightly hostage to its own documentation.

The Cappella Palatina is, by any serious assessment, one of the most complete and remarkable interior spaces in European art. Built between 1132 and 1143 for the Norman King Roger II, it represents the point at which three distinct traditions — Byzantine, Islamic, and Norman — operated simultaneously in a single building without apparent contradiction.

San Miniato is known to most visitors as a white truffle town — its November Mostra Mercato del Tartufo Bianco draws chefs and collectors from across Europe, and the town's identity is substantially built around Tuber magnatum pico.

The standard Italian incentive programme is built around three elements: accommodation at a marquee property (a five-star hotel in Florence, a converted masseria, a cliff-side villa on the Amalfi Coast), a curated activity programme (cooking class, wine tasting, boat excursion, city tour), and a gala dinner in a photographically significant setting.