Belmond Hotel Caruso

Belmond Hotel Caruso

Hotel Caruso occupies the highest and quietest point of Ravello, some 350 metres above the Tyrrhenian Sea on the Amalfi Coast, an hour by car from Naples airport and reached on foot through the narrow stone steps around Piazza San Giovanni del Toro. The palazzo dates to the 11th century, raised by the patrician Roman d'Afflitto family after a shipwreck bound for Constantinople left them stranded on the cliff, largely destroyed by the Republic of Pisa, and rebuilt from the 1500s onward, with the colonnade of the raised garden and much of the frescoed interior added over the following two centuries. In 1893, the hotelier Pantaleone Caruso and his wife Emilia Cicalese rented five rooms in one wing and opened it as the Pensione Belvedere, a name the restaurant still carries. The Caruso family ran the hotel until 2000, when Orient-Express Hotels, now Belmond, bought the property and spent four years restoring it with Italy's Fine Arts authorities before reopening in 2005 with 50 rooms and suites, no two alike, set into the original stonework of the palace. Belmond has belonged to LVMH since 2019. Rooms are furnished in Neapolitan style with 18th-century antiques made expressly for the house, hand-crafted terracotta floors, and walls in the ochre known locally as Naples yellow, with Vietri ceramics and Assouline books on the shelves rather than the usual hotel paperbacks. Two 13th-century stone lions guard the entrance. Dining runs three ways: the Belvedere Restaurant for Mediterranean cooking under frescoed ceilings, Il Pantaleone for a tasting menu, and a poolside grill turning out wood-fired pizza by the elliptical infinity pool, reached along a rose arbour and cut into the cliff edge so the water appears to run straight into the Tyrrhenian. The spa uses Comfort Zone and Aromatherapy Associates products. In the grounds, set apart from the main building, Villa Margherita offers two suites with a private chef and butler, favoured by guests who want the view without the traffic through the lobby. The pull here has always been the view rather than the programme, and staff know it: Gore Vidal called the terrace outlook the most beautiful in the world, and generations of guests, Greta Garbo and Jackie Kennedy among them, came up the hill for exactly that reason rather than for spa menus or turndown theatrics. The restoration was careful rather than showy, so the palace still reads as a palace, arches and vaulted stone rooms and marble hallways that predate the hotel by eight centuries, with the 2005 work filling gaps rather than replacing character. It suits a traveller who wants to sit still somewhere old and let the coast do the work, who would rather watch the light move across Monte Lattari through a storm than tick off excursions, though the boat trips to Amalfi and Positano and the private tours of Pompeii are there for anyone restless. You should not come if you want a beach at the door, since Ravello sits high above the water and the sea is a shuttle ride away, or if you want anonymity, since the hotel leans into its history of famous guests and its proximity to Villa Rufolo means Ravello's summer music festival brings crowds through town most evenings in July and August. You should come for the position itself, for a palace that has been a home, a ruin, and a hotel across nine centuries and still shows all three, and for a pool and a view that most of the coast's newer luxury builds are still trying to imitate. The short version: An 11th-century palazzo above Ravello with 50 rooms, an infinity pool over the Tyrrhenian, and a hotel history running back to 1893 under the Caruso family, now Belmond.