Palazzo Avino

Ravello sits high above the Amalfi Coast, and Palazzo Avino sits high in Ravello, a pink twelfth-century villa on the lip of the cliff with the whole coast falling away below it. The family that runs it has made it one of the coast's steadier addresses, less a resort than a large house that happens to take guests.

The house

The building goes back to the twelfth century, a patrician villa of the sort Ravello is built from, and it became a hotel in 1997 under the Avino family, who still run it. The rooms are done in a warm southern key, colour and antique tile and the odd chandelier, and the point of nearly all of them is the same: the view down the coast. The pink of the facade has given it its nickname, the pink palace.

The table

Rossellini's, the main restaurant, holds a Michelin star and is the reason a good number of guests come at all. There is a second, easier table and a bar built around lobster and martinis, and a wine list deep in Campanian bottles. The kitchen cooks the coast, the fish of the bay and the lemons and vegetables of the slopes, without trying to be from anywhere else.

Why it's in VANE

It is family-run, rooted in one of the most-photographed stretches of coast in the world, and it manages to feel like a house rather than a machine. The one-star kitchen means the table stands on its own, and the beach club at the bottom of the cliff answers the coast's one real drawback, that the sea is always a long way down. It earns the ridge.