Commissioning one of the most famous golf course architects in the world for the St. Anna project was a crowning achievement for Mario Valle. Robert von Hagge (1927-2010) designed, built or revised over 250 courses around the world with his “von Hagge, Smelek & Baril” firm, including the famous Blue Monster at Doral in Miami, Le Golf National in Paris (2018 Ryder Cup venue), and Is Arenas and Bogogno in Italy. Charismatic and with an almost aristocratic bearing, von Hagge created all of his courses paying particular attention to different types of golfer, from beginners to experienced and medium handicap players. With his extreme sensitivity to the aesthetics of design, he moulded the natural morphology of the landscape, maintaining many of its characteristics intact. His courses are picturesque, with beauty in design having always been one of the architect’s fundamental objectives. He went as far as to study the shadows cast by trees and the undulations of the ground at different times of the day, in order to understand the artistic impression this would leave on the player. The image of the St. Anna course, with its delightful plays of light and shade in the low evening sun, undoubtedly ranks among the top memories of all of our players. Every shot on a von Hagge course is different. As he commented: “A golfer actually plays for about eleven minutes in a round: the designer’s job is to make the rest of the time between shots enjoyable. Between shots, the player should think ‘Wow! How lucky I am to be able to play here’.”