Palazzo Rondinella

Palazzo Rondinella was built in 1694 for a Ravello paper merchant whose family kept it for three centuries. Every April the swallows come back to nest in the loggia, which is where the name comes from, and we have never had the heart to move them. Today it is a 22-room hotel with thick stone walls, majolica floors laid in 1890 and a garden of lemon, rosemary and jasmine that drops in terraces toward the valley.

Rooms are deliberately uncluttered: linen the colour of wet sand, oak beds made by a carpenter in Scala, marble bathrooms with deep tubs or rain showers. From the Deluxe rooms upward you look straight out over the bays of Minori and Maiori, with the coastal road reduced to a pencil line far below. At night the only soundtrack is church bells and, in summer, a distant concert drifting up from the Auditorium.

Breakfast is served on the belvedere until noon: ricotta from Tramonti, warm sfogliatelle, almond cake, fruit from our own trees. Il Nido, our small terrace restaurant, cooks what the valley sends up that morning, and the cellar leans heavily on Campanian whites. There is a heated pool among the olive trees, a treatment room for massages, and a concierge who will happily arrange a boat from Amalfi or a table at a trattoria you would never find alone.

Ravello sits 350 metres above the sea and cars stop at the edge of the old centre. Our porters meet you at the drop-off point 150 metres away and carry your bags up the lane; from there the Cathedral square is a four-minute stroll. We are a place for slow mornings and long dinners, not for nightlife, and guests tend to leave rather quieter and happier than they arrived.