Rebuilt in the Art Nouveau style after a devastating 1899 landslide, the family-owned Hotel Santa Caterina evolved from a six-bedroom villa and wartime military recovery site into a legendary, cliffside Amalfi Coast retreat famed for its Hollywood romance and cascading lemon gardens.
A 19th century villa located overlooking the Tyrrhenian sea built into the cliffs of the Amalfi coast, still under private ownership.In 1899 when a landslide destroyed the villa Dr. Giuseppe Gambardella had built for his family, his son Crescenzo set about restoring it in the Art Nouveau style synonymous of that era. In 1904, Hotel Santa Caterina officially opened with just six bedrooms. During the War, the hotel was occupied by German forces and after The Allied liberation the US Army saw it as a fitting place on the Neapolitan Riviera for officers to recover.
Today, Hotel Santa Caterina is managed by the great grandchildren of the original owner. Guests return to this family run hotel with scented gardens of bourgainvillea and lemon groves cascading down the hill to the water.The hotel’s Liberty style is seen in the arched windows and the vaulted ceilings against a backdrop of 19th-century antique furniture and traditional Vietri majolica from the nearby town of Vietri sul Mare.
There is a reason why Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor filmed Cleopatra and Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt shot their iconic movie, Mr. & Mrs. Smith at the hotel - the setting is the stuff of dreams. Author John Steinbeck described the approach to Santa Caterina as being “hooked and corkscrewed on the edge of nothing.