PANAREA — From July 28 to 31, on a terrace above the harbour of the smallest inhabited island of the Aeolian archipelago off Sicily’s northern coast, a group that in past years has included some of America’s most powerful technology and media figures will sit cross-legged and attempt to want nothing at all.
The retreat is run by The Path, the meditation company that Dina Kaplan launched in 2014 after co-founding blip.tv, the New York web video platform acquired by Maker Studios in 2013 and folded into Disney a month later. She has hosted curated retreats since 2018 and brought them to Panarea six years ago.
“Panarea is my favorite place in the world,” Kaplan told Italy Now. “I first came for three days and ended up spending the entire summer there.” The chic Mediterranean gem in fact shot into the headlines after the likes of Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison and Beyoncé vacationed there recently. “You never know who you’ll see turning a corner on the island,” Kaplan told Italy Now.
Even so, her guests are out for a different type of break. Past attendees of The Path’s curated Mela (apple) retreats include WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg, Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker Amy Ziering, as well as venture capitalist Deborah Jackson amongst others. This summer, Kaplan is bringing that same invitation to Panarea: four days of meditation, conversation, sea air and silence on one of Italy’s most sought-after islands.
“There is a shift in the mindset ,” CEO and founder of Regenerative Travel told Italy Now. People “want to have more authentic transformative experiences.”
A market for stillness
Spending on meditation and mindfulness grew 18.9 percent annually between 2019 and 2024, according to the Global Wellness Institute, which puts global wellness tourism at $894 billion in 2024.
What Kaplan sells is scarcer than an exclusive villa on a car-free island. It is where the people who built the attention economy pay to escape it, together. “In today’s world our attention is so divided, and it’s getting worse every day,” she said.
The four-day Panarea programme costs $3,000 and excludes lodging, lunches, and the journey to a car-free island reached via Catania and Milazzo.
What Panarea gets in return
Whether Panarea benefits is the sharper question. The island has no cars, a few hundred winter residents, and an economy compressed into ten weeks of summer. Kaplan’s group dines at family-run restaurants and takes its aperitivo (pre-dinner drinks) at the Raya, the hotel that has set the island’s tone since the 1960s.
For an archipelago that has long argued it deserves visitors who stay longer and spend deeper, a clientele that arrives to sit still may be the most sympathetic form of luxury tourism yet devised. The superyachts anchor offshore and are gone by morning. The meditators come ashore, spend, linger, and leave calmer than they arrived. “It transforms people,” Kaplan said. Panarea may have found its ideal guests.
