A pool cut into the cliff edge, a terrace that ends in open air, and a palazzo the D'Afflitto family raised in the eleventh century. Caruso holds the top of Ravello for another summer.
Ravello sits high over the Amalfi Coast, and Caruso sits higher still. The hotel takes the top of the town, more than a thousand feet above the water. Getting there means a climb through old streets, then a garden, then the sea laid flat below.
The palazzo
The building started as an eleventh-century palazzo, put up by the D'Afflitto family. For centuries it passed between owners and went quiet. In 1893 a man named Pantaleone Caruso turned it into a hotel, and the name held.
The guest register from those years reads like a century of arrivals. Virginia Woolf wrote here. Greta Garbo came to vanish for a while. Jacqueline Kennedy took the long view from the terrace. Belmond runs the palazzo now, and the bones of it, the vaulted ceilings, the frescoes, the worn stone, are still the reason to come.
The pool
The infinity pool is the image most people carry home. It is heated, set on the cliff edge, and pitched so the water runs into the horizon with no line between the two. Swim to the far side and the coast drops away beneath you. Boats pass so far below you could cover them with a thumb.
The gardens reach the same edge. Umbrella pines, cypress, roses, and paths that open onto the fall to the sea. Lunch and drinks move outside when the weather holds, which on this coast is most of the summer.
You do not look at the view at Caruso. You stand inside it.
The Splendid EditThe table
Ristorante Il Pantaleone takes the terrace. Armando Aristarco cooks it, working from the produce of the coast and the hills behind it. Lemons the size of a fist, fish off the local boats, tomatoes from volcanic soil. Dinner arrives with the whole gulf in front of you and the village lights coming on one by one.
Ristorante Il Pantaleone at Caruso, A Belmond Hotel — Courtesy of Belmond
Adagio is the newer room. It is a bar set into a historic part of the palace, under a painted fresco ceiling, with period mirrors along the walls that pass the light around. It reads as the place to close an evening, once the terrace has cooled.
The season
Caruso runs through the warm months and shuts for winter, the way the coast does. Rooms and suites face either the gulf or the gardens, and the walk to breakfast crosses the same terrace that sold the place to Garbo. Reservations go through belmond.com.
Caruso, A Belmond Hotel, Ravello reopens for the 2026 season on the Amalfi Coast. Details and reservations at belmond.com.
Photography courtesy of Belmond — © Belmond, Caruso, A Belmond Hotel, Ravello