News item: the small military airport in Salerno, 45 miles south of Naples, reopened not long ago as Salerno Costa d’Amalfi and Cilento Airport. This arrival has been treated as a boon for the lower half of the Amalfi Coast; among the flurry of commercial airlines to offer flights this summer is British Airways, three times a week from Gatwick.
But the real headline, to my mind, should be the access Salerno now provides to everything below it. Southern Campania, Basilicata, Calabria and Puglia are all prime road-tripping (and whisper it, less saturated) destinations, connecting with ease and offering landscapes of alternating severe and serene beauty.
No single big luxury hospitality brand has yet got a toehold down here. Though it’s only a matter of time – particularly in Puglia, where Four Seasons has already tapped a massive plot on the Adriatic. Instead, the region is marked by some of the best little hotels in the Mezzogiorno. Two are ancestral family homes; only some have restaurants, and not one of them has a lift (your knees have been warned). But each in its way is an antidote to the high-spec sameness that is becoming the all-too-predictable language of luxury abroad.
Palazzo Belmonte is in the seaside village of Santa Maria di Castellabate, a 50-minute drive south from Salerno. The Cilento Coast, Campania’s anti-Amalfi, shares little of the glamour that prevails to the north, but enjoys a wilder version of its beauty. I first stayed at this hotel 18 years ago; it was run then by Prince Angelo Granito Pignatelli di Belmonte, whose family built the palazzo in the early 17th century. These days his daughters Francesca and Maria Sofia are in charge.
