The pink palace of Ravello
Ravello sits high above the Amalfi Coast, on the quiet floor where the crowds of Positano and Amalfi thin out, and Palazzo Avino sits high in Ravello. The building goes back to the twelfth century, a patrician villa of the kind the town is made from, and the Avino family reopened it as a hotel in 1997, giving it their own name in 2013. The pink of the facade is what you read first from the water, and it is the reason everyone calls it the pink palace.
What sets it apart from most houses of this rank is that it is still a family concern. The three sisters, Mariella, Attilia and Mariavittoria, run it now, the second generation. There are forty-three rooms, ten of them suites, dressed in eighteenth and nineteenth-century furniture, antique carpets and the ceramic tile of the coast. Mariella brought contemporary artists in to make work for the walls, and turned the café into an ongoing project, Caffè dell'Arte, which is the sort of thing a family does and a chain does not.
The pink of the walls is the first thing you see from the sea, and the last.
A star, and a hundred martinis
Rossellini's is the serious room, and it holds one Michelin star in the current Italian guide, the kitchen under Gianni Vanacore cooking Campania with a light hand, the fish of the bay and the lemons and vegetables of the slopes. It runs seasonally, dark through the winter, and it is the reason a good number of guests book at all.
Around it sit the easier pleasures. Terrazza Maraviglia does fresh pasta and small plates in the sun. The Lobster & Martini Bar opens in the evening with local lobster and something close to a hundred martinis, which is either excessive or exactly right, depending on the hour. Caffè dell'Arte adds a pianist and cocktails among the artwork. Nobody is asked to choose between a temple and a bar; the house keeps both, on the same terrace.
Down to the water
The one honest flaw of the Amalfi Coast is the distance to the sea. The towns cling to the cliff, the water is always a long way below, and half the luxury of the place is spent getting to it and back. Ravello, higher than most, feels this more than anywhere.
Palazzo Avino answers it with the Club House by the Sea at Marmorata, about fifteen minutes down from the town, a beach platform with a casual kitchen and a swim between courses. It does not pretend the sea is closer than it is. It simply builds a way down, and lets you take the long lunch at the water rather than looking at it from the ridge.
Ravello is the calm storey above the Amalfi crowds, and Palazzo Avino has held the best of it for a generation. A family still answers for the place, the kitchen carries its star on its own merits, and the club at Marmorata settles the one argument a cliff-town hotel cannot win. On the record it earns its ridge. That is why it is in VANE.
