By Monica Mendal

Art-led stays, accommodations, small detours: which places have stayed with you, and what made them worth the journey? Is there a particular art-led stay you keep returning to, in memory or in person?

La Colombe d’Or in Saint Paul de Vence is the first stay that comes to mind when I think about art stays. Sleeping under a Picasso, dining next to a Chagall, splashing beside a Calder… It's not lost on me how incredible that is. And art isn’t incidental to Provence, so much as it’s embedded in it. I mean, this isn’t some random vacation home turned inn, owned by some wealthy art collector. These artists lived in and around the region, and they actually paid for their stays and meals here in art. The result is a restaurant with rooms that basically doubles as an unofficial museum. It’s really remarkable.

Another hotel near and dear to me with a fantastic art and design collection is La Minervetta in Sorrento, where owner Marco De Luca has transformed his family's cliffside hotel into a vibrant cabinet of curiosities. Iconic pieces by Ettore Sottsass, Gio Ponti, and Gaetano Pesce mingle with works by Michelangelo Pistoletto and Mario Schifano, alongside colorful Vietri ceramics, vintage finds, books, and treasures gathered on his travels. The result is a joyful, deeply personal celebration of Italian design overlooking the Bay of Naples.

The edit focuses on places that match a certain summer feeling. When visiting a place, what tells you it holds that kind of mood, the one worth returning to?

The summer feeling I’m most attached to comes from my upbringing. My Colombian parents somehow ended up in New England, leaving Bogotá behind to raise me and my brothers in a small beach town twenty-five minutes north of Boston, where buoys hung like ornaments along white picket fences next to saltbox houses, and lawns stayed vivid green from the orchestra of sprinklers in the summertime. Summers there were my idea of heaven.

I spent the whole summer barefoot, afternoons hauling an inflatable dinghy behind our four-wheeler down the rocky beach in our front yard, tagging along as my dad and brothers pulled lobsters from traps that would land on our plates by lunch. Kids ran free through town all day, feral and unaccounted for, and nobody saw their parents again until dinner. Evenings ended at someone's barbecue, most likely ours. Our summer diet was hotdogs and hamburgers, pasta salad and lobster rolls, watermelon slices, and cold beer, the whole day folding into night with a languid ease that felt endless. I'd go to sleep with sandy feet and wake up to do it all over again, never quite getting the sand out of my sheets until September.

Don’t get me wrong, I love a classic Mediterranean summer too — its bravado born of high glamour and dramatic cliffside swims, and living in Europe, I get my fair share of it. But the summer feeling I crave most is the one that takes me home, where days aren’t complicated or overplanned, but shaped by more elemental and childlike pleasures.

When I moved to France, I found traces of that feeling along the Atlantic coast. In places like Île d'Yeu, off the Vendée coast, where bicycles outnumber cars, swims are followed by ice cream at the port, and long, stretched-out days at the beach give way to evenings in Saint-Sauveur, its whitewashed houses and colorful shutters spilling with life as friends gather in the streets like a nightly block party. And on Cap Ferret, that slip of pine and sand across the bay from Arcachon, where long oyster lunches at weathered cabanons blur into aperitifs at friends' cedar-shingled ranch homes stacked up against the shoreline overlooking the Dune of Pilat.

Each destination seems to carry its own material, texture, or natural element. Is there a place whose physical character has shaped the way you see it? What draws you to it?

I love the feeling of volcanic islands. Their beauty is harder to define than the obvious, sun-drenched coastal paradise we all default to with the white sand, turquoise water, all that postcard stuff. Lanzarote and Pantelleria, two islands I love, are darker and moodier. The black landscape shimmers with volcanic rock, and there's a spiritual quality here that you feel almost instantly. They're not conventionally beautiful in a grand, dramatic way. The appeal is subtler, even sensual. They’re harsh but seductive, austere but soulful. I love that tension. There's this rawness to volcanic islands that strips everything back to the essentials, and anytime I'm surrounded by that black soil and glistening rock, I’m so moved! I'm a Scorpio ascendant, so I'm sure that has something to do with it. I love places that ask you to go deeper.

Some places stay with you long after you leave. Where have you traveled recently that left a mark, and what was it about that place?

I spent two weeks in Mani, in the southern Peloponnese, this past May and it really surprised me. Part of its magic is that it isn’t easy to reach, and its isolation is what shaped its history: for centuries, local family clans governed the region themselves, fighting one another, leading them to build stone tower houses for protection, creating fortified stone villages stacked into the hillsides. What remains now is unexpectedly beautiful, with those same towers slowly crumbling back into the landscape, against the backdrop of the rugged Taygetus mountains. The roads wind through the hills between nearly empty villages, past hundreds of small Byzantine churches that feel suspended in time, and down to hidden coves tucked into wild, unspoiled coastline. It felt like discovering a forgotten corner of Greece. Still wild and totally untouched.

Is there one destination that shaped the way you travel now, and what was it about it?

My trip to Malta was one of the most formative for me. Not just because of the place itself, but because of what it unlocked for me; it was a trip that completely altered the course of my life.

It was exactly ten years ago, when I was still a fashion editor in New York City. My boyfriend at the time was living in London and we were planning our first trip together that summer. I was young and in love, and naturally defaulted to the usual idea of romance, suggesting we go to the Amalfi Coast. Amalfi, though, was out of our budget at the time, so he suggested Malta instead. It felt random to me. I'd barely heard of it, and I probably couldn't have pointed to it on a map, but I was too in love to protest.

I arrived in Malta with no expectations, and that attitude definitely contributed to the way I experienced the place. I didn’t have a mental archive of it the way you do with more photographed, culturally saturated places. There were no fixed images in my head, like the French Riviera or the Amalfi Coast, no familiar references to compare it to. No lists from friends who had been before. So when I got there, I was genuinely surprised to learn that places like this exist. It was so beautiful, but in a quieter, more unstudied way. It wasn't staged for tourism, wasn't shaped around the expectation of being seen.

We stayed in an Airbnb, as there were no hotels to speak of then (the new Casa Bonavita opened this summer and I can’t wait to visit). I was in awe at every turn. I spent days wandering Valletta, Malta's lively urban heart, past golden limestone facades, carved balconies, narrow streets steeped in history. I walked through Marsaxlokk, a fishing village where colorful wooden luzzu boats lined the harbor, and explored Mdina, the walled hilltop city of honey-colored limestone and winding medieval streets. Its car-free alleys, baroque facades, and quiet palazzos feel frozen in time; from its bastions, the whole island stretches out below. I swam at the lunar-shaped St. Peter's Pool and in Gozo's crystal-clear coves, and watched the sunset from Għar Lapsi, a quiet sheltered inlet where the sun’s descent dusted the water gold.

That trip left me wondering how many places like it are out there, unclaimed by any bucket list… places that are textured, surprising, and beautiful in their subtlety. My visit to Malta had a bigger impact on me than I knew at the time. It gave me a newfound curiosity and a voice I didn't know I was looking for, because not long after, I quit my job as a fashion editor to become a travel journalist, writing my first travel story for Vogue, about Malta.