The Last Great Terrace on the Amalfi Coast

The road to the terrace is a single lane of hairpin bends, and the driver takes it at the pace of a man who knows there is no prize for arriving early. Lemon groves fall away to the left. The sea appears in fragments, then all at once, the colour of a stone you would keep in a pocket.

At the top, the hotel gives almost nothing away. A gate, a bell, a courtyard of pale stone that has been warmed by the sun since morning. There is no music. There is no queue at a desk. Somebody says your name once, correctly, and hands you a glass of something cold and pale, and that is the whole of the arrival ritual. It has been the same for four decades, which is precisely the point.

The architecture of doing very little

The building itself is a former private house, and it still behaves like one. Twelve rooms, no corridor longer than a few steps, a terrace that runs the length of the seaward wall and is furnished with little more than teak, linen and shade. The pool is small and slightly too cold, and the staff will not hear of it being otherwise.