A Wild and Glamorous Resort Offers a Different Vision of the Italian Coast

With the clouds hovering low in the sky, we motored across the brackish Lago di Burano. At the engine, our guide, Uberto Resta Pallavicino, steered us amid the jumping branzini and pointed out the flamingos and herons in the distance. (Yes, flamingos in Italy .) Uberto was taking us to a medieval tower, covered in splotchy lichen, on the opposite shore. As a child, he used to have sleepovers there with his cousins; his family has owned the land that stretches in either direction along the coast for close to a century. On the second floor, there are still some rustic '70s-style futon mattresses built into roughshod beds.

We climbed to the balcony, where my son asked about the holes beneath the parapets. “That’s where they would pour the hot oil,” Uberto explained with a spark in his