Anita Motta takes a sip of her ginger margarita and considers the kind of people who visit the Aeolian Islands. “They’ve changed,” she says, as we sit on the veranda of Il Principe di Salina, the elegant boutique hotel she co-owns on Salina, the second largest of the islands.

“When I was little my parents brought me on the overnight ferry from Napoli, and it was Italian families like us who holidayed here. These days more than 70 per cent of our guests are British, American or Australian. And now they’ve found us, they keep coming back.”