Maserati and Egnazia Ospitalità Italiana rebuild the Grand Tour, bringing together shared vision and cultural relevance.
The original Grand Tour took years. Eighteenth-century aristocrats crossed the Alps by carriage and worked down the peninsula slowly enough to absorb its history and learn more about the cultures that crafted every visible relic they encountered. The contemporary version, by comparison, takes one long weekend, yet sacrifices too many treasures in between.
Maserati and Egnazia Ospitalità Italiana have decided to bring the in-between back in 21st-century style.
Announced from Modena on July 29, the collaboration pairs the Trident with the hospitality group founded by Aldo Melpignano, the man behind Borgo Egnazia. At its centre is a programme called the Italian Way of Driving by Maserati. It unites a series of routes and driving experiences designed around each of the group’s properties and built on the premise that the road between each destination can be as much a part of any vacation as the arrival.
The timing is deliberate. Maserati has been building cars since 1914, but 2026 marks one hundred years since the Trident first appeared on the hood of the Tipo 26 at the Targa Florio, where Alfieri Maserati took first-in-class. A century on, the brand is spending the year demonstrating how the pleasure of the drive is the whole point, alongside a partner, with the perfect hotel portfolio to complement that idea.
That portfolio is considerable. Borgo Egnazia, the Puglia resort that hosted the G7 in 2024 and numerous celebrity weddings, anchors the partnership. Also included, along the route: Ostuni a Mare, on the Adriatic Coast; Santavenere in Maratea, on Basilicata’s cliff-hung Tyrrhenian Sea; Hotel de Len, Hotel Ancora and Castel Badia in the Italian Dolomites; and La Tiara di Cervo on the Costa Smeralda. Melpignano founded Egnazia Ospitalità Italiana in 2023 on the conviction that tourism should protect the places it profits from and intends to extend that model across Italy.
In Puglia, between Borgo Egnazia and Ostuni a Mare, guests will take the Discovering Puglia route in the new GranTurismo and GranCabrio, the right cars for a landscape of low stone walls, olive groves and sudden sea. Elsewhere, from Maratea to the Dolomites and Sardinia, the itineraries are entrusted to the Grecale, the Trident’s D-SUV, better suited to switchbacks and the occasional unpaved detour.
Each route is drawn to suit its territory. Anyone who has driven the Amalfi Coast in August knows that a beautiful road and a good drive are not the same thing.
“This collaboration stems from a shared vision of travel as a cultural experience, before it is simply a journey from one place to another,” says Riccardo Vannetti, chief brand and marketing officer of Egnazia Ospitalità Italiana. “With Maserati, we share a deeply Italian idea of style, balance and connection with places: the road becomes part of hospitality, a way to engage with landscapes, communities and memories through a more conscious gaze.”
For guests who want to follow the thread back to its source, the program includes access to Maserati’s Ron Arad-designed showroom on Viale Ciro Menotti in Modena, along with the headquarters of Maserati Classiche. One is where Fuoriserie bespoke commissions take shape, and the other is where the brand’s history is kept in working order. On-demand dealer activations in Puglia and the Dolomites, supported by a Grecale fleet, complete the program.
There is a logic to two Italian institutions arriving at the same conclusion from opposite directions. One spent a century learning how to make the distance between places worth covering; the other spent 15 years learning how to make arrival feel like more than a transaction. Between them, they have rebuilt the Grand Tour for people who no longer have years to spare but still have the sense to want the drive.
