Escape to Isolatos: Notes on Curated Remoteness

There is a recognizable Italian vacation subculture: the summer Greek island escape whose value increases slightly when the island is less obvious, the route is more complicated, and the story requires a flowchart involving an airport, taxis, ferries, and perhaps a night in Piraeus. This post is about a contradiction that exists during that vacation. 

The desired vacation we are talking about here is presented as an escape from ordinary life. Yet it unfolds during the most synchronized moment of the Italian calendar, clustered around Ferragosto and the August shutdown. It is an escape performed almost collectively. Offices close, cities partially empty, and people disperse toward beaches, mountains, and islands on roughly the same timetable. 

Enjoying sunset on the island of Isolatos.

The recurring conversation

It begins like this: someone mentions where they’re going in August. The name is Greek, melodic, and not immediately placeable. People pull out their phones to see where the place is. The more remote or unknown, the better.

These conversations start in late spring and early summer. Inevitably, the details include the number of people in the village and the best tavernas in the chosen remote spot. To be clear: the fewer the better for both.

The central idea isn’t simply escapism but a curated remoteness: getting away, but in a culturally legible way that can be planned, narrated, and appreciated by others who understand the code. The logistical difficulty of the Greek vacation doesn’t undermine the escape. It authenticates it. This is a small fraction of Italians, but something we have noticed, likely tied to the socioeconomic circles we circulate in.

We confess to falling prey at times to this desire too. We want curated remoteness, but also authentic experience and connection to people and places — even if the connection is just someone changing the sheets or serving us moussaka.

To further point the finger back at ourselves: we recently spent upwards of six hours planning a possible Greek-island getaway, all the while thinking about remoteness. (We won’t tell you which island...because we don’t want y’all to be there.)

A direct flight to a large island is useful. But a flight to Athens, a transfer to Piraeus, a ferry, and then perhaps another ferry to a smaller island can feel more like an achievement. You have not merely booked a beach holiday. You have discovered a place. The route becomes part of the story told before departure and again after returning.

There is also a mild form of distinction involved in all this. Mykonos is too obvious. Santorini is beautiful but compromised by the fact that everyone has heard of it. The ideal island is recognizable to the initiated but unfamiliar to at least some people around the dinner table. Its obscurity is a feature. The island name itself becomes a credential.

At dinner

As we were writing this, we went for dinner up the Bergamo walls. Every summer, temporary venues pop up on the old city walls serving simple dishes with great views. At dinner, the 50+ group lamented modern travel: Too much is known; there are too many images of what to expect and what to do. They waxed fondly of times with just maps and hope to see something.


This is the same group who often talks about what we have called curated remoteness. Maybe the search is a reaction to modern travel, a need to recreate what it used to be like.

Some numbers

Ferragosto is a public holiday on August 15. The long August shutdown is a strong workplace and social convention that varies by industry, employer, and family situation, but nonetheless is powerful in Italy. ISTAT data show August as the central month of Italian summer tourism: in the third quarter of 2025, 39.3 percent of tourist nights in Italy fell in August, more than in July or September, and domestic tourists accounted for 53.3 percent of August stays. Those figures concern tourism within Italy, not Italian departures for Greece, but they support the broader idea of a synchronized vacation calendar.

According to the Bank of Greece, Greece received about 40.7 million inbound travelers in 2024. Just over 2.0 million came from Italy, an increase of 10 percent over 2023. That puts Italians at roughly 5 percent of all inbound travelers. In that year, Italian visitors generated about €1.23 billion in receipts, or roughly 5.7 percent of Greece’s total tourism receipts. Italy trails larger markets such as Germany and the United Kingdom, but it is plainly one of Greece’s important source markets.

The Italian data tell a similar story from the other direction. Banca d’Italia counted about 1.6 million Italian trips to Greece in 2024. Greece ranked sixth among foreign destinations by Italian spending, after Spain, the United States, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. Italians spent about €1.37 billion there. Greece accounted for 2.6 percent of Italian outbound trips but 4.2 percent of outbound spending.

Greece is not merely an archipelago awaiting Italians in linen shirts looking for a slice of remoteness. Some visitors take package holidays to Rhodes, Crete, or Corfu. Some arrive on cruise ships and spend a few hours in Santorini or Mykonos. Some visit Athens, Thessaloniki, or the mainland. Some are Greeks returning to islands they have visited for years. The search for the slightly obscure island reached by a sequence of conveyances is real, but it belongs to a segment of travelers rather than everyone.

Italians are not the dominant visitors to Greece, but they are not a negligible group either.

Homegrown

We suspect the idea of curated remoteness is much larger than Italy. It applies to countries with a certain wealth and vacation mentality. But perhaps the desire is more accentuated here because Italy has so many beaches, islands, and summer spots. In 2017 post Abbronzatissima: Notes on the Allure of the Suntan in Italy, we wrote that Italy is surrounded by so much sea, it must compel Italians to seek it out ritualistically every summer, a ritual bordering on obligation.

But Italy’s homegrown abundance of sea and the crowded nature of the experience (Italians and people from elsewhere) make some Italians – our sample subculture – more targeted in their search for remoteness. And that search leads them to Greece. Greece has more islands and more coastline than Italy, especially in the "island-dense, fragmented coastline” sense that matters for the Greek-island vacation idea. Uncharted frontier. New cultivated remoteness.

To be fair, the Italian “system” is set up such that vacation time is highly prescribed: August. Maybe the forced synchronization leads some Italians to look farther afield.

We, on the other hand, have the freedom to take vacations in different parts of the year. People are often perplexed when we tell them we are staying put for July and August, enjoying our adopted city, and not the sea or the mountains. We’ll take a vacation in the fall.

In the 2024 post Why do we travel?, we mused about why we travel at all. In our case, over the years the "why" has changed. Perhaps the observations are just a passing phase for the group of friends we hang with.

Or maybe we are overthinking this: all this analysis is for naught and an Italian taking a vacation on a remote Greek island simply wants to get away from it all and not with their co-nationals. And that’s all.  

Happy summer vacation!