Today the streets at Woy Woy and Umina were also empty …
It was the rainbow theme at Ettalong that made our day as well as the Italian dishes shared with A & B at Amalfi - which were divine …
Antipodean Amalfi
By Ondine CohanePhotographs by Gianni Cipriano
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The Fine Arts & Exhibits Special Section
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- More From the Special Section: Creativity by artists and institutions can inspire in challenging times.
Inside the luxury Amalfi coast stay that stars in a new crime drama
High in the hills above crowded Positano, the highly private Treville hotel is the backdrop to Amazon Prime’s Costiera. Sarah Turner checks in
Terraces of houses cling to Positano’s hills ALAMYLast winter, while most of the Amalfi coast was in its usual hibernation mode, the road just above Positano experienced a daily flurry of activity. First trucks would arrive. These weren’t the usual film pantechnicons but smaller ones (originally a track for donkeys, the road is tiny). Then came cars with blacked-out windows, choreographed to perfection — as each vehicle arrived an electric gate would open so it could drop down into the highly private Treville. Once home to the Italian film and opera director Franco Zeffirelli, it’s now a luxurious boutique hotel.
Last winter’s blacked-out cars contained actors and crew coming to film Costiera, a new crime drama from the Breaking Bad and 30 Rockdirector Adam Bernstein. Treville stars as a luxurious hotel, which is not exactly a stretch. Jesse Williams plays Daniel, a former US Marine who joins a hotel staff to investigate the kidnapping of the owner’s daughter. I think we can assume that, like The White Lotus, this will be a show about bad things happening in a beautiful place.
When I gaze at the town of Positano from one of Treville’s many terraces for the first time, I reckon that I’m looking at the most theatrical place in the world. The cliffs are like stage curtains that draw your eye to the town. A bright yellow cathedral with an extravagantly tiled dome roof takes centre stage, with terraces of houses clinging to the hills, while boats are moored prettily offshore, waves tickling their sides.
A hot tub in a nook at Treville “The only place in the world conceived on a vertical rather than a horizontal axis,” the painter Paul Klee, with his draughtsman’s eye, said of Positano. “It is a dream place that isn’t quite real when you are there and becomes beckoningly real after you have gone,” John Steinbeck wrote, more poetically, in 1953. These days it’s safe to say that Positano’s dreaminess is somewhat diluted by day-tripping crowds. The Amalfi coast season runs from April until late October, and is particularly intense from June to September, but Treville has a very privileged place within it.
In 1969 Zeffirelli decided to buy a house here, then over 35 years expanded it by buying the surrounding properties and employing set designers from his operas and films to transform it into a home that matches Positano for sheer, highly vertiginous theatricality. Since then Treville has been a beautifully honed synthesis of pattern and colour — handmade tiles on the floor, wafty curtains on the terraces, ceramic plates on a wall next to the kitchen — and is still as Zeffirelli designed. When he owned it Maria Callas, Elton John and Liza Minnelli visited. Elizabeth Taylor stayed so often that even the Italian paparazzi would eventually leave her alone.
In 2010 Treville quietly became a hotel. Now owned by the US and Canada-based Friedland family, its hybrid home-hotel vibe is completely seductive. Photographs dotted around show Zeffirelli posing in kaftans with his neighbour, Rudolf Nureyev, and hanging out with Minnelli. The name translates as “three villas” but there are now five, all in gelato colours, and just 16 rooms and suites (where I stayed), with a few more due to be added in the middle of this year.
One of 16 rooms at the boutique Treville hotel Last year Madonna and JLo booked in — at different times — to Casa Zeffirelli, the four-bedroom villa the director kept for his own use. The original furniture, inlaid with mother-of-pearl and made in Syria, is still in place and there are front-and-centre views onto the Amalfi’s crinkle-cut coast. Casa Bernstein, named after Leonard Bernstein, who also stayed regularly, is another zinger, with a vast circular shower in what was once a bread oven and its own goldfish pond. But all the rooms have a dreamy vista, beautiful at any time of day and particularly heart-stopping as the sun sets.
- Read our full guide to the Amalfi coast
It may have turned down the chance to let Rob Rinder and Monica Galetti go behind the scenes for Amazing Hotels: Beyond the Lobby but Treville is not one of those Fort Knox-style hotels where the ultra-rich and famous squirrel themselves away. Yes, a lift now goes straight from reception to Casa Zeffirelli and some of the rooms have private swimming pools, but everyone gathers at the restaurant Maestro’s for properly, resolutely Italian food — creamy burrata with tomatoes gathered from the vines around the hotel, squid caught just offshore, cloud-like tiramisu — outside on the vine-covered terrace. In the cream-tiled Bianca bar, the white-jacketed bar staff create cocktails that are all potions and panache. Sting popped by recently and said it looked the same as when he hung out here in the 1980s.