Late stage and screen director Franco Zeffirelli’s former home is the best way to experience the romance of Positano, says Georgia Boscawen
Franco Zeffirelli’s style as a director was defined by a lavish romanticism. From the 1940s to the 2010s, the Tuscan-born director created richly detailed and emotionally charged interpretations of classic stories from Romeo and Juliet in 1968 to his Oscar-nominated Hamlet in 1990. His films, operas and theatre productions were celebrated for their sensory depth and classical beauty. He brought the same vision to his home, Villa Treville. Zeffirelli bought the property in the 1960s, lovingly refurbished it and lived and worked there for more than 35 years. Towards the end of his life, the estate was sold, and today Villa Treville exists as a hotel, teetering on the edge of the Positano cliffs.
Stylistically, little has changed since the hotel was privately owned, apart from the restaurant and the spa, which sits in what was once the villa’s greenhouse. The hotel has a classical Mediterranean feel that it owes to the director and his friend, architect Renzo Mongiardino. It is filled with traditional Amalfitan tiling, and its limestone exterior walls are covered in tangled vines.
From the small, blue-tiled lobby I step into a lift and ascend to the long, moodily lit “Azzurra tunnel” that opens out to Treville’s terrace restaurant, Maestro’s (where it’s all about the pasta). Few hotels can deliver on romance the way Treville does. It is immaculate, but there is a distinctive “lived-in” feel, perhaps because it is still filled with Zeffirelli’s personal collection of antique ornaments, books and photographs.
I’m led to the Bernstein suite (named after the American composer and pianist Leonard Bernstein), one of Treville’s signature suites, entered via its own huge terrace adorned with a Renaissance majolica-tiled panel depicting San Francesco di Paola. You can sleep here with both double doors open – thanks to the lockable terrace gate – and wake up to the crashing of waves on Arienzo Beach below. Inside, the suite has a striking blue chevron tiled floor, and an unusual domed shower that was originally the villa’s bread-kiln.
Set across two hectares of gardens (and a private beach), the hotel consists of 16 suites across six villas that are hewn, at various levels, directly from the cliffs. Lawns, organic vegetable gardens and an arboretum can be explored via tiled pathways that meander up and down the cliffside, following the natural topography.
Before dinner on the main terrace, drinks are served at Bianca Bar, which is set in a dazzling Moorish-inspired room. Martino Acampora, Treville’s general manager tells me that when Mick Jagger came back to stay in the hotel(having been many times before as Zeffirelli’s guest), he took one look at the bar and remarked, “it’s all exactly the same!” – the photographs of Zeffirelli by Slim Aarons and Horst, scattered around the property, pay testament to this. Cushions covered with mirrored Indian fabric bounce light around the white stone room and its 19th-century Libyan furniture, opening out onto a terrace set beneath a vine-tangled pergola.
Regardless of whether you knew his work, the emotion that has been poured into Villa Treville is remarkable. It’s as if each corner of the entire property has a story. Villa Treville is effortless and romantic, a perfect accompaniment to Positano.