It’s not always easy to track down Italian hotels that do justice to their
surroundings — there’s no point having a balcony view of a line of cypress
pines marching up a golden hillside if you can hear the people next door
coughing and there’s no hot water for the claw-foot bath.
Fortunately, the A-list travel expert Herbert Ypma knows the Italian addresses
that perfectly blend style, substance and setting. Here, he reveals his
jaw-dropping national favourites.
VILLA FELTRINELLI
Lake Garda
If I had to choose my favourite hotel in the world, it would be Villa
Feltrinelli. It was renovated by the famous hotelier Bob Burns, of Regent
Hotels, as his retirement home, but he couldn’t stop himself restoring it.
So, when the budget passed the $30m mark and there was still quite a way to
go, he decided to turn it into a hotel. This level of luxury, with millions
spent on every room, doesn’t make financial sense, so it’s a complete fluke
for the guest. The rooms are huge — the bathrooms are the size of a normal
hotel room — and so beautiful. The villa fulfils every cliché you’ve ever
heard about Italy. There’s the stunning natural setting on the lake, and
layers of architecture and landscaping that just keep adding to its beauty.
Then there’s the 80ft custom-built mahogany speedboat to take you to this
little place on the island for lunch or to Verona for the opera, followed by
dinner on board.
Yes, it’s expensive, but two nights here are better than a month anywhere
else.
Details: 00 39 0365 79800, www.villafeltrinelli.it; doubles from £500. British
Airways (0870 850 9850, www.ba.com) flies from Gatwick to Verona. Hotel
transfers take 75 minutes and cost £115.
HOTEL SIGNUM
Aeolian Islands
This place is so simple and stylish: the perfect place to escape to. It’s on
Salina, the greenest of the Aeolian islands, and that achingly romantic
movie Il Postino was filmed not far from the hotel — you can’t get more
gloriously Italian than that. Of course, the entire cast and crew stayed
here during shooting. It’s not that this place is so luxurious (it isn’t),
but there’s something very beautiful about its aesthetic. The owners have
ensured that every detail of the architecture conforms to age-old Aeolian
traditions. The rooms are calming and authentic, and sitting on one of its
myriad terraces is like having your own outdoor sanctuary. Salina could
almost be in the South Pacific, it’s so overgrown with bougainvillea, and
jasmine, lemon and caper trees grow in seemingly effortless abundance.
Details: 00 39 090 984 4222, www. hotelsignum.it; doubles from £79. Ryanair
(www.ryanair.com) flies to Palermo, on Sicily, from Stansted. Air Malta
(0845 607 3710, www.airmalta.com) and BA (0870 850 9850, www.ba.com) fly
from Gatwick to Catania. There are daily ferry crossings to Salina from
Palermo, Messina and Milazzo, with SNAV (www.snav.it) and Siremar
(www.siremar.it); from £5.
LA POSTA VECCHIA
Lazio
This is where Jean Paul Getty planned to live out his years — but then the Red
Brigades kidnapped his grandson. Getty was so disgusted that he turned his
back on Italy and sold the palazzo, which is how this extraordinary place
came to be available to the paying guest. Getty was a fanatical collector,
and he’d had the world’s leading curators furnish the palazzo with the most
amazing furniture. Every room is different: one has a bed that belonged to a
Medici; others have baths carved from solid blocks of marble. Although La
Posta Vecchia has a private black-sand beach, Getty wanted an indoor
swimming pool — but when digging started, it uncovered two Roman villas with
intact original mosaic floors and enough artefacts to open a museum, so
that’s exactly what Getty did. This place really is special.
Details: 00 39 06 994 9501, www.lapostavecchia.com; doubles from £420. EasyJet
(www.easyjet.com) flies to Rome from Gatwick, Bristol, Newcastle and
Nottingham; BA (0870 850 9850, www.ba.com) flies from Birmingham, Gatwick,
Heathrow and Manchester; Ryanair (www.ryanair.com) flies from Glasgow
Prestwick; and Aer Lingus (0818 365000, www.aerlingus.com) flies from
Dublin. Taxi transfers to the palazzo cost about £60.
LOCANDA DELL’AMOROSA}
Siena
Carlo Citterio was a disillusioned advertising executive from Milan who
stumbled on this abandoned medieval hilltop estate, not too far from Siena,
and was so enamoured with it that he ended up buying one of the larger
houses. He decided to turn the stables into a restaurant and, over the next
couple of decades, he pretty much bought up the whole village, turning the
entire thing into a hotel complex. It’s not styled to death — in fact there
are some pretty ugly buildings — but that’s part of the charm. It feels
real.
In appearance, the village is probably close to how it would have been four or
five hundred years ago, with those classic Tuscan elements: the dirt road
lined with pines, the beautiful piazza. Also, the restaurant (the first
thing Citterio renovated) is very good, and has made quite a name for itself
— and that’s saying something in Tuscany.
Details: 00 39 0577 677211, www.amorosa.it; doubles from £167, B&B.
Meridiana (0845 355 5588, www.meridiana.it) flies from Gatwick to Florence,
an hour from the hotel. Or fly to Pisa, an hour and 45 minutes’ drive from
Amorosa, with BA (0870 850 9850, www.ba.com), from Gatwick; EasyJet
(www.easyjet.com), from Bristol; or Ryanair (www.ryanair.com), from Stansted
and Liverpool. Holiday Autos (0870 400 0010, www.holidayautos.co.uk) has a
week’s car hire from £119.
PARCO DEI PRINCIPI
Amalfi Coast
Gio Ponti was the Frank Lloyd Wright of Italy. When he was commissioned to do
the Parco dei Principi, he was in his seventies, all the elements of his
distinctive creativity had matured to perfection and he wanted to do
something very different from the classic palazzo. His signature approach to
interiors was to adopt a scheme using white with one single colour — in this
case, blue — and this was carried through everything from the floor tiles to
the telephones, all of which he designed. It really is one of the most
persuasive pieces of post-war architecture around. One of the things I love
is that you get such different people here. A Ponti revival has been under
way for the past few years, so you get architecture students who come to pay
homage, then you get Belgian families who’ve been coming here for the past
30 years for two weeks every summer and have no idea the place is hip and
they start queuing for dinner 10 minutes before the restaurant opens. And
there’s Sorrento, a hedonist’s playground, on the doorstep.
Details: 00 39 081 878 4644, www.hotelparcoprincipi.com; doubles from £140,
room-only. British Airways (0870 850 9850, www.ba.com) flies to Naples,
about an hour from Sorrento, from Gatwick. BMI (0870 607 0555,
www.flybmi.co.uk) flies from Heathrow; EasyJet (www.easyjet.com) flies from
Gatwick and Stansted. A taxi from the airport costs about £45.
SASSI HOTEL
Basilicata
Basilicata’s landscape is very different from the rest of Italy. It has huge
canyons, with houses chiselled into the rock face — think Petra, in Jordan,
on an enormous scale and you start to get the picture. The ancient town of
Matera is like a stone-age version of the Manhattan cityscape, and in the
midst of this is Sassi Hotel. It has been created out of a series of simple
peasant sassi (cave dwelling) homes and a couple of more ornate 18th-century
buildings. So there’s the facade with neoclassical detailing, then,
literally 10ft beyond the entrance, it’s a cave, where the organic forms of
the original sassi are preserved in the breakfast room and bar — although
the bedrooms have been whitewashed. The surrounding sassi restaurants and
bars have spearheaded a renaissance, which has sort of made Matera the place
to be in Italy right now.
Details: 00 39 0835 331009, www.hotelsassi.it; doubles from £62, B&B.
Ryanair (www.ryanair.com) flies from Stansted to Bari, a four-hour drive
from Basilicata. British Airways (0870 850 9850, www.ba.com) flies from
Gatwick to Bari. Suncars (0870 500 5566, www.suncars.com) has a week’s car
hire from £159.
Herbert Ypma’s Hip Hotels: Italy is published by
Thames & Hudson at £18.95. To buy it at the reduced price of £17.05,
including p&p in the UK, or any travel guides, call The Sunday Times
Books First on 0870 165 8585
