Booking a hotel because The White Lotus made it look good was just the beginning. The expanded version of set-jetting involves volcanic wine country, an invitation-only whisky room in Edinburgh and a Slovenian cellar where the bear salami is aged by the moon.
These are the European destinations worth building a trip around — and the films to reference before and after the experience.
Sicily: For wine lovers
In 1971, Francis Ford Coppola couldn’t shoot in Corleone — it looked too modern. He moved east, to the hillside villages of Savoca and Forza d’Agro near Taormina, and accidentally gave Sicily a cinematic identity that has never worn off. Bar Vitelli, where Pacino’s Michael Corleone first saw Apollonia, still serves granita under the same vine-covered terrace. The Church of San Nicolo, where they married, still stands at the end of the same cliffside street. “White Lotus” Season 2 doubled down on Taormina and introduced the Etna wine country to a generation of viewers who hadn’t found it yet.
On Etna’s slopes, the Benanti and Tornatore wineries produce nerello mascalese and carricante from vines rooted in volcanic soil, unlike anything else growing in Europe right now. Planeta handles the broader education, with wines that have become reference points for the whole island. The place to stay is Monaci delle Terre Nere, a former 17th-century Augustinian monastery that Guido Coffa spent years converting into a Relais & Chateaux wine estate — 62 acres of vineyards, citrus orchards and lava-stone terraces, with a kitchen that lives and dies by what the farm produces that morning. Before leaving the area, lunch or dinner at Anciovi, the poolside seafood restaurant at San Domenico Palace — the Four Seasons where The White Lotus was actually filmed — is mandatory.
