DISCOVER ITALIA!

A TRUE ORIGINAL

The Regina Isabella on the island of Ischia is more than just a hotel. Carolyn Lyons gets the spa treatment and discovers a place to stay that’s a destination in its own right.

Allow me to transport you. Imagine – yes, I know it’s hard at this time of year – waking up one May morning, throwing open the shutters and stepping out onto your little balcony. In front of you stretches a sweeping expanse of clear sea under a fresh, flawless sky. Below you, blue and white fishing boats bob in the bay alongside sleek yachts and power launches. To your right, low white buildings tumble down the hillside to the beach. To your left, a headland rises, terraced with vines and crowned with a frieze of dark Mediterranean pines. The only noises are the murmur of Italian voices and the sound of the pool man dropping mattresses onto the sun loungers, like a card player slapping down a winning hand. That was precisely how I started my first day at the Regina Isabella. In a world increasingly stuffed with

luxury five-star hotels, all more or less alike, very few have the character and history to be genuine originals. L’Albergo della Regina Isabella at Lacco Ameno on the island of Ischia in the Bay of Naples is among them. There is its location for a start – how many new hotels would be allowed to colonise one entire end of a town, and its beach, as the Regina Isabella does? Then there is the architecture – although it is only 50 years old, Regina Isabella has the spacious feel of an earlier era. The 134 rooms, plus 12 suites, occupy three separate but linked buildings, including a 3,000 square metre spa. In the angle between them sits the main swimming pool, raised on a deck above the narrow beach. Ischia is a volcanic island famous for its thermal springs and the Regina Isabella is built directly on top of one of them, which not only supplies the spa but also heats the

50 ITALIA! March 2007

pool and, in part, the whole hotel – an early example of ecological thinking!

A COLOURFUL SETTING All the hotel’s floors are made of the painted majolica tiles that were a traditional Neapolitan craft (they are still made, but prices nowadays have become prohibitive). Every floor in every room is a different colour or design. In the public rooms, the tiles effloresce into superbly colourful and intricate patterns, like the 40 cards from the Neapolitan deck illustrated in tile on the floor of the card room. Add chandeliers made of Murano glass and you have an interior décor that is absolutely irreplaceable. Finally there is the hotel’s history. In the 1950s Ischia was a typical poor Mediterranean island occupied with farming and fishing – farming more than fishing since Ischia’s volcanic soil is highly productive. Then one man changed the way the island lived:
THERE HAVE BEEN MANY ILLUSTRIOUS GUESTS: RICHARD BURTON AND ELIZABETH TAYLOR STAYED HERE WHEN THEY WERE MAKING CLEOPATRA.

Angelo Rizzoli was a Milanese agent who built one of Italy’s postwar fortunes, fi rst in publishing then as a fi lm producer. Non-Italians probably know him best for the sumptuous Rizzoli bookstore on New York’s Fifth Avenue or as producer of some of Fellini’s greatest fi lms, including La Dolce Vita and 8½. In the latter, Fellini cast a Rizzoli lookalike as the harassed Producer to Marcello Mastroianni’s terminally indecisive Film Director.

ILLUSTRIOUS LINKS Rizzoli fell in love with Ischia and single-handedly created its tourist industry, shamelessly enlisting his movie stars and celebrity friends as salesmen and women. Italians of a certain age can remember

going to the cinema and, before the main fi lm came on, there would always be an advertisement or a newsreel item plugging Ischia. Rizzoli even made a series of lowbudget romantic comedies with titles like Romance on Ischia or Love on an Ischian Beach. The Regina Isabella was Rizzoli’s fl agship. Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor stayed here when they were making Cleopatra (since they were both married to other people at the time they had to have separate suites). Other illustrious guests have included Maria Callas, Alfred Hitchcock, von Karajan, Berlusconi, Francis Ford Coppola, Joseph Fiennes and Jude Law. I learned about Rizzoli at Villa Arbusto, the mogul’s old villa, just up

the hill from the hotel. Now public property, the villa houses two small but very well-presented museums – one about Rizzoli’s life, full of classic black-and-white photographs of 1950s show business; the other an archaeological museum, because the island of Ischia in general (or Pithecusae as it was called in ancient times) and the town of Lacco Ameno in particular is the site of the earliest Greek settlement in Italy, dating back to the 8th century BC. The exhibits include the so-called ‘Nestor’s Cup’, a cup inscribed with the fi rst known written reference to Homer’s Iliad. Down in Piazza Santa Restituta, outside the hotel gates, the actual archaeological excavations are also open to the public underneath a little fi sherman’s church. Again,

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