It was thirty years ago when Mitchell Hochberg stumbled on Forte dei Marmi. The developer, who’s just opened the Moxy-AC hotels complex in downtown L.A., was driving through Italy on vacation with his wife Susan.

“We were basically lost. It was a Saturday afternoon, and we drove into town, and it felt like we were in a make-believe world, a movie set of what you’d think the Côte d’Azur was in the 1960s,” he recalls. It was an instant infatuation, and the couple has made near-annual pilgrimages to the Tuscan seaside town ever since.