Borgo Santandrea

It reads, from the water, as a village stacked on the rock. Borgo Santandrea sits about ninety metres up on the coast road between Amalfi and the little fishing cove of Conca dei Marini, its rooms strung between fifty and eighty metres above the sea. Getting down is the trick the coast rarely solves: here a run of eight lifts threads the cliff, two of them dropping the full seventy-nine metres to the water, so guests reach the private beach without the usual march down a few hundred steps. The Marinella Beach Club waits at the bottom, a white-pebble strand with its own jetty and a lounge on the rocks, one of the few private beaches on this shore.

The design

The building was an existing 1960s hotel, closed and then worked over for close to four years before it reopened in 2022, the first new luxury hotel on the Amalfi Coast in fifteen years. The architect Bonaventura Gambardella and the interior designer Nikita Bettoni kept the vertical, borgo-like plan and filled it with the crafts of the region. Thirty-one patterns of hand-painted geometric tile, made by Cotto Vietri and drawn in part from Gio Ponti and the floors of Pompeii, run through the rooms and stairs. Around them sit re-issued Gio Ponti furniture, Italian marble, Venetian glass, burnished brass and natural linen: mid-century Italy, restated rather than copied.

The table

Alici, the panoramic restaurant, holds one Michelin star, awarded in the 2024 Italy guide, with Crescenzo Scotti at the pass cooking the citrus and seafood of the coast. Below, the beach club runs Marinella and the seaside AQVA, so lunch can be taken with your feet almost in the water and dinner high on the terrace. It is a full house rather than a single dining room.

Why it's in VANE

The Amalfi Coast is short on hotels that feel genuinely of the place rather than dropped onto it. This one is family-owned, made by regional hands, and it answers the coast's oldest problem, the distance between a clifftop room and the sea, with an engineer's patience. The World's 50 Best Hotels list has noticed, ranking it among Italy's highest in 2025. It earns the view.