The story of one the most elitist tourist resorts in Europe, Costa Smeralda in the North of Sardinia, has often been told from the point of view of male protagonists involved in its conception and construction. From Ismail Prince Karim Aga Kahn, who saw the real estate potential of purchasing parcels from local shepherds, to the selected group of male architects (such as Luigi Vietti, Michele Busiri Vici, and Jacques Coüelle) employed to forge a new architectural identity. Women have primarily been presented through the seductive performativity of their bodies, as in Slim Aaron’s photographs that cemented the ideology of the glamorous Mediterranean holiday. The tanned and objectified female body was instrumental not only in reinforcing the myths of the ‘Mediterraneanists [who] often fell back upon cliches (sun worship, human centeredness, the pleasure-loving life, even backwardness) to describe what made it different from other parts of the world,’ as Adrian Forty argued in his text ‘Mediterranean’ in the book Matera Imagined from 2017 – but also as a tourist marketing tool for the region and for Italy as a whole.

This paper focuses on the story of two women: Simone Bodine- in art Bettina Graziani (1925–2015) and Dolores Guinness (1936-2012) analyzing their tacit agency in the making of Costa Smeralda as well as their pioneering role in the evolution of the Sardinian coastline. Both women were not only photographed by Slim Aaron but they also commissioned their holiday villa to the same architect Michele Busiri Vici: Villa Bettina was the first villa ever built by the architect and Villa Guinness was one of the last. An in-depth typological analysis of the two villas will be carried out in conjunction with other alternative primary sources (on-site photographs and written material produced by the clients), to put into question the hierarchy of the (male) architect archive as the main form of knowledge for these projects.