Benetton’s legacy: industrial diversification and trophy hotels

The mention of Italian fashion brand Benetton usually brings back memories of its award-winning advertising campaigns from the eighties; A rainbow of sweaters and patterns symbolizes a vibrant, modern look.

Still, even the most casual observer might wonder what happened to the Benetton family’s vast fortune, given its years of fashion and cultural dominance. The answer is a complex tale of controversy, industrial diversification and real estate ownership boasting some of Italy’s most elite hospitality holdings.

The Benetton family began producing and selling knitwear in the 1950s, and in 1965 it became the Benetton Group and opened the first Benetton Knitwear factory. In 1981, a holding company, known today as Edizione, was created to diversify the Benetton family’s investments. “History teaches us that the Benetton family has learned to create a management team separate from the owners,” says Bocconi professor Andrea Colli, who has studied Edizione’s growth over five decades. “They appointed high-level managers to key positions and curbed the temptation to interfere in decision-making.”

While the benefits in hindsight may cast doubt on some of Edizione’s deals, the holding has certainly been betting on some of Italy’s most important industries over the years. These included a significant stake in Autogrill, Italy’s best-known highway restaurant chain, as well as shares in Rome airport operator and Italian insurance giant Generali. Other bets included a minority stake in Pirelli, an investment in telecoms leader Telecom Italia and even a foray into banking with shares in Mediobanca. Among the more esoteric companies, Edizione also acquired a stake in an Argentine livestock enterprise.

Fast forward to 2023, and the holding faced a number of difficult decisions amid poor financial performance. Company documents show that in 2022, the second generation of the Benetton family made a radical decision to break with the past. Accordingly, in addition to restructuring businesses including Autogrill, the company has taken steps to partially demerge its real estate division, Edizione Property, while repaying its debts. The logic was to allow Edizione to focus on its core sectors and companies in which it directly or indirectly held a strategic stake, while allowing its shareholders – members of the Benetton family – to pursue their own business strategies in relation to the spin-off assets.

Edizione has indeed acquired a number of trophy commercial real estate assets with significant potential. Although they attracted offers from a number of property suitors in late 2022, including Hines, Apollo e Coima, the family were keen to retain control of their best assets to date while increasingly working with independent property managers. Edizione’s consolidated results for 2025 place the family’s total real estate value at €1 billion across 69 assets.

Plans to further professionalize the wealth management business have seen the family appoint a new property management firm, Dekus, by the end of 2024. Dekus was founded by Mauro Montagner, who served as CEO and General Manager of Edizione Property from January 2018 to early 2025. Dekus, owned by Montanner (80 percent) and Fabio Provini (20 percent), was launched with a guaranteed contract from Benetton. family to manage their allocated assets and also win an important PGIM contract. In addition to his extensive in-house experience at Edizione, Montagner has previously held important positions such as CEO of Allianz Real Estate Southern Europe and Managing Director of Italy at Morgan Stanley, where he served as a portfolio manager for a large pan-European real estate fund.

The task given to Decus was to take over the management of the assets of the four branches of the Benetton family, with the assets being returned to Carlo, Giuliana, Luciano and the Gilberto family after a restructuring in 2023. When it comes to hospitality, the siblings have plenty of Italian icons.

These include the Hotel Monaco & Grand Canal in Venice, a 100-room hotel that the Benetton family purchased in the 1990s. In the following decades, Luciano Benetton combined three neighboring buildings to increase its capacity. These include a 30-room wing with relatively minimalist decor, the historic Palazzo Dandalo, now used as a ballroom and function space, and Palazzo Selvadego, whose 40 rooms were recently renovated by architect Moreno Carniato.

Another important asset is the recently opened Bulgari Hotel Rome, which occupies an early twentieth-century building in the city center, built in a typical Roman Fascist style. The former government building was built between 1936 and 1938 and designed by the architect Vittorio Ballio Morpurgo. Real estate advisory CBRE helped Edizione select a tenant in 2020, Roman accessories and jewelry designer Bulgari, which converted the building into its first Roman hotel in 2023. Another Italian Bulgari hotel is located in Milan. Today the hotel is considered one of the most luxurious hotels in the Eternal City. It has 114 rooms, most of which are suites, a rooftop restaurant and bar, and a 1,500 square meter spa. Other hotel assets believed to be owned by the Benetton family include properties in Florence and Verona.

The property portfolio also includes other major commercial assets, such as the Fiumicino logistics center development project near Rome and the huge historic palazzo in Venice, the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, which has become a real headache for Decus.

The former Venice post office, owned by Regia, the holding of Sabrina Benetton, Gilberto’s daughter, reopened after a major redesign in 2016 as a department store managed by DFS Group, the Hong Kong luxury retailer controlled by LVMH. The luxury multi-outlet premises, which had annual rents of around €9 million, finally closed in April 2025 due to poor earnings due to changing retail habits, despite Venice’s 35 million annual visitors. Regia and Decus are reportedly responding to requests to turn the huge space into a museum or multi-occupancy space for craft workshops. The only thing it can’t become is a hotel: hotel use was not included in the planning permission for the department store conversion, and Venice has been applying a planning block to hotel conversions since 2018 unless they receive special permission from both the city council and the city council.