Hotel Santa Caterina

A few hundred metres east of Amalfi on the coast road, a white villa in the Liberty style sits on top of a cliff planted in lemons and oranges. Hotel Santa Caterina, Amalfi, has belonged to the Gambardella family for four generations, since Giuseppe Gambardella first took in guests at the start of the twentieth century, and the family still lives and works on the property.

History

The Gambardellas were Amalfitan landowners whose terraces produced the lemons that gave the coast its trade. The villa they built on the cliff became a small hotel in the early 1900s, and each generation has extended it along the slope rather than upwards, so that the house now spreads through gardens, pavilions and a second building at the shore. The women of the family have been as prominent as the men in running it, and the current generation leads a staff many of whom have worked there for decades. Glicine, the restaurant, was awarded a Michelin star in the 2010s.

Architecture and design

The main villa keeps its Liberty details: curved balconies, painted ceilings, wrought iron and floors of Vietri majolica. The gardens are the hotel's real architecture, terraced down the cliff with pergolas of vines, citrus and bougainvillea. Two glass lifts run through the rock to the lower level, where a seawater pool, a sun deck on the rocks and the restaurant Al Mare face the open sea. Among the terraces stand two stand-alone suites, the Romeo and Juliet chalet in the lemon grove and the Follia Amalfitana, each with its own garden and sea view.

Rooms and suites

The 66 rooms and suites are furnished with antiques and ceramics, and nearly all have balconies or terraces over the sea. Rooms in the main villa have the highest ceilings; those in the garden pavilions are more private and closer to the water. The two garden suites are the most asked for, and for honeymoons the Romeo and Juliet chalet books far ahead.

Dining

Glicine, named after the wisteria on its terrace, holds a Michelin star and serves Campanian cooking with produce from the hotel's own gardens. Al Mare, beside the pool at sea level, is the lunch restaurant, with grilled fish and pizza from a wood oven. Breakfast is taken on the upper terrace looking back towards Amalfi's cathedral tower, and the bar makes its limoncello from the estate's lemons.

Wellness

A small spa with treatment rooms and a fitness room sits within the hotel, and the seawater pool and rock deck at sea level are the main attraction on warm days. Guests swim straight off the rocks.

Weddings and events

Santa Caterina hosts weddings on its sea-facing terraces and in Glicine, and the ceremony can take place in the garden with Amalfi in the background. The hotel suits receptions of modest size rather than large functions, and private dinners on the terraces are a regular request from families staying in the house.

Location

The hotel stands on the Strada Statale 163 just outside Amalfi, a ten-minute walk from the town's piazza and cathedral. Ravello is twenty minutes up the hill, Positano forty minutes along the coast. Naples airport is about ninety minutes by road and Salerno station about an hour; the hotel's boat and the public ferries from Amalfi's pier avoid the road in summer. A luxury hotel in Amalfi that stays in one family for more than a century has a continuity few on the coast can match.