For the table
Monastero Santa Rosa
Conca dei Marini · Amalfi Coast
A 17th-century monastery on a clifftop promontory between Amalfi and Positano, reborn as a twenty-room hotel with a Michelin-starred table hung over the Gulf of Salerno.
The bones are the point. The cells where the nuns once lived are now twenty rooms and suites, arranged over two terraced levels that step down the rock, each one different, each with the Gulf of Salerno below. The cloister gardens still climb in tiers; the spa makes dramatic use of the old vaulted stone; and the infinity pool, cut into the terrace, is one of the most photographed on the coast for a reason. Condé Nast Traveler readers voted it the number-one hotel in Italy in 2019.
Il Refettorio has held a Michelin star since 2017. Chef Alfonso Crescenzo cooks the flavours of the Campanian coast with a light, modern hand, and serves them on a terrace suspended over the water, where lunch and dinner come with the whole gulf for a view. It is the rare hotel restaurant that would pull you up the cliff on its own.
The Amalfi Coast trades in spectacle, and most of it shouts. This one does not. Twenty rooms, an independent owner, a one-star table and a monastery's calm: it is the coast at its most composed, and the antidote to the crowds a few hairpins away.
