The approach to Splendido, A Belmond Hotel, Portofino does much of the work before the hotel has said anything at all. The road climbs away from the harbour in tight, shaded bends thick with oleander and bougainvillaea, and by the time the entrance appears the village has slipped from sight and the whole bay has arrived in its place. Somebody was waiting as we pulled up, the bags went one way and the car another within a minute, and that was the pattern for the rest of the stay, in which very little needed asking for twice.
We had arrived deliberately early, closer to half past nine than to any reasonable check-in hour, on the principle that a hotel like this deserves as many hours as can be prised out of a day. Our suite was not ready, which we had assumed, and what we had not planned for was how little fuss that would generate. There were no lengthy apologies and no lobby chair with a time attached to it, only a suggestion that we might like breakfast and directions up to La Terrazza, so the morning began three hours ahead of schedule.
The view is the whole idea, and the pool is where it delivers
That first breakfast set the tone for everything that came after it. A macchiato arrived, the harbour lay open below us, and somewhere between the first sip and the second, it became clear that the entire property has been arranged around a single view. Every table in every restaurant, every seat at the bar and every balcony on every floor faces the Gulf of Portofino. There are gradations depending on where you sleep, but there is no version of a stay here that turns its back on the water.
The pool is the picture most people visualise before they arrive, and it belongs to that small category of famous things that grow rather than shrink when you finally stand in front of them. It has been cut into the hillside on a terrace of its own, curved rather than rectangular, deep enough to swim properly in and ringed with terracotta umbrellas and planting that spills over the edges towards the sea. Below it the bay holds a slowly rotating cast of very large yachts, which are there every single day and do something faintly absurd and entirely pleasant to the composition.
What we had not expected was the taste. The first mouthful on that first swim was salt, because Splendido draws fresh seawater up from the bay into the temperature-controlled pool, so you spend the afternoon swimming in the Ligurian Sea several hundred metres above it. Nobody mentioned this to us. We worked it out ourselves and then spent a happy quarter of an hour telling one another about it, which is generally how the best hotel details arrive. The temperature sits somewhere close to perfect, warm enough that an hour goes by before anyone thinks about getting out.
The terraces around the water have been built up in levels rather than laid out on one flat deck, so there is a tier at the waterline for swimming, another above it for watching, and quieter corners higher up for anyone who would like the sun without an audience. A slate shelf runs the length of the seaward edge, wide enough to take a glass, a phone and a folded towel, which is a far more elegant answer to poolside breakages than the usual ban on glassware. The loungers had been made up before we reached them, the side tables are marble, and small box is provided with sun cream, hair oil and cold water for anyone who wants it.
If we have one small wish for the terrace, it is for a little more of the music. There is a soundtrack, quiet and pleasingly vintage, but it sits so far back that on a still afternoon you can forget it entirely, and another notch or two would lift the scene without disturbing any of the calm. Our suite was ready by midday, hours earlier than promised, and somebody walked down to the pool to tell us rather than leaving us to wander up and ask. We thanked them, and stayed exactly where we were for a little longer.
The Prestige Junior Suite reads as a private Riviera residence
Junior Suites here run from 39 to 44 square metres, and ours sat on the second floor on the side that catches the sunrise. You come in through a small hall with a console table, a full-length mirror and, mercifully, somewhere sensible to put a suitcase, and then the room opens into a sitting area with a two-seater sofa in butter yellow and white stripes and a pair of lamps positioned exactly where anyone would want to read. Waiting on the table were Champagne, fruit, a small cake, a note from the general manager and a coffee table book, which is the kind of welcome that winds up proudly displayed on a shelf at home as a permanent memento.
The bed is high and generously cushioned, and we slept extremely well in it. The coffee station, kettle and minibar have been built into a cupboard that vanishes into the joinery, and what pleased us more than the disappearing act was that somebody had clearly thought about the morning after: a drawer pulls out to give you a surface to make a drink on, which sounds like nothing at all until you have wrestled with a beautifully concealed coffee machine at seven in the morning. Everything non-alcoholic in the fridge is included, and it was replenished so quietly that we never once saw it happen.
Much of the room’s character sits in the details rather than the layout. Painted ceramic plates hang on the walls, framed prints fill the spaces between them, and the chandelier and lamps carry the same warm light through from the corridors outside. Nothing about it looks as though it arrived as a set.
The balcony, though, is the best thing about the room. It runs the length of the suite with two sets of doors onto it, a heavy classic table and chairs at one end and an outdoor sofa at the other, and it sits close enough to the tennis court that we could hear play drifting up through the afternoon, which we came to enjoy a great deal more than we had expected to. Our mornings out there, with a macchiato and the light climbing over the headland, were the quietest and probably the loveliest hours of the whole stay.
The bathroom is enormous, and the shower is a room in its own right, with two heads, one set into the ceiling and one on the wall, both with proper pressure, a marble bench, and a mosaic worked into the tiling that includes a pair of seahorses. We started spotting the same motif elsewhere once we knew to look for it. There is Acqua di Parma on the shelf, a dental kit and mouthwash laid out, thick soft towels, and a Dyson dryer tucked into the drawer.
The one thing we found ourselves wishing for was a desk. We often work while we travel, and a room of this size could hold one easily without losing any of its charm. The balcony table did the job perfectly well, and on a terrace like that it is hardly a sacrifice, but anyone planning to spend a morning at a laptop may like to know in advance.
Lunch at Splendido Grill, where the wine does the talking
Splendido Grill sits a level below La Terrazza and shares more or less the same panorama, under a striped canopy with rattan chairs and green and white patterned plates, and it is the more relaxed of the two rooms in exactly the way that lunch ought to be.
The wine service is what we have talked about most since coming home. We wanted something interesting by the glass without committing to a whole bottle, and the Sauvignon we had in mind was not on the list. Rather than steer us towards whatever happened to be open already, the team offered to open a bottle they were happy to pour by the glass, told us precisely what it was and described how it would taste with real accuracy. That may sound like a small courtesy, but staff who genuinely understand what they are pouring are rarer than they should be, and here it happened at every meal across three days.
Lunch itself was gloriously Ligurian. The Mare e Monti pizza arrived with smoked provola, local shrimp, confit datterino tomatoes and basil oil, the sweetness of the prawns holding its own against the smoke. The Lettuce is a far better dish than its name suggests, romaine with San Stè fondant, crispy bacon and hazelnuts. La Nerano di Paolino is the one we would order again tomorrow, a smoked spaghetti with courgette, caciocavallo and shellfish tartare that takes a Neapolitan classic somewhere altogether more savoury, and it is the best version of that dish either of us has eaten anywhere. A plain tomato pasta alongside it was cooked properly al dente, which is not a given even at this level. Dessert was a raspberry millefoglie with each layer of pastry fried separately, giving it a snap that the usual assembled version never quite manages.
It is worth knowing that anyone spending a day in Portofino can book a table here without staying at the hotel, and we would recommend that you do.
Gardens, an outdoor gym and possibly the most beautiful tennis court in Italy
Above the pool the property opens out into gardens, with cobbled paths climbing between olive and lemon trees, sofa seating tucked into the terraces and enough shade to make the middle of the day entirely bearable. The lemons hang within reach, and we wouldn’t blame you if you were tempted to pick one. Dior Spa Splendido and Le Jardin des Rêves Dior occupy this stretch of the hillside, and although we did not take a treatment on this visit, the setting alone explains why the partnership makes such sense here.
The whole site is stitched together by these paths, zigzagging between levels with small signs pointing towards the gym, the pool, the courts and the way down to the water, and part of the pleasure is discovering it on foot at your own pace rather than being marched around on arrival.
We would not normally give a hotel gym a paragraph of its own, but this one has earned it. Indoors it is well equipped and properly maintained, with a trainer on hand. Outdoors it becomes something else entirely: spin bikes and a multi-station rig set on terracotta decking among the olive trees, looking straight out over the harbour. Cycling at seven in the morning with that in front of you is a more persuasive argument for exercise than any wellness programme we have ever been sold, and it has been done with restraint, which is the difficult part.
Turn left from the entrance instead and a vine trained overhead makes a green tunnel of the path, and a short flight of steps brings you out at the tennis court, looking over the pool, the gardens and the bay beyond. As places to play tennis go, we are struggling to think of a lovelier one anywhere in European hospitality.
Back inside, the lobby is where the history gathers. Photographs of the guests who made this place famous line the walls, alongside objects, books and lamps commissioned specifically for the hotel. The restoration took three years and was completed across the rooms only recently, and the care shows most clearly in the things that could so easily have been swapped for something generic, from floor patterns that follow Ligurian precedent to materials sourced locally.
Even the keys are a pleasure. They are leather-wrapped fobs with the room number attached, hanging on hooks beside a small reception desk in the old way, so a glance tells you roughly how full the hotel is. It was close to capacity while we were there, and at no point did it feel like it.
Down to the Piazzetta, the gelato and the boat
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The walk down to Portofino’s Piazzetta takes around 12 minutes on a zigzag path, with a raised walkway carrying you above the road until a short crossing delivers you into the square. There is a complimentary shuttle for anyone who would rather not, though we never took them up on it.
The Piazzetta is small and entirely aware of its own charm: a little shopping, the harbour façades in their pinks and ochres, and Gelateria San Giorgio, which has been making gelato on this square since 1954. A scoop of peach with a scoop of vanilla was the unexpected highlight of our first afternoon and had vanished by the second, because everything really is made fresh each day. What took its place was a chocolate gelato made without any milk at all, which had no business being as smooth or as deep as it turned out to be. Belmond guests are looked after here, so it is always worth mentioning.
The boat, though, is the thing to organise. Seen from the water everything inverts, and the hotel finally reveals itself for what it is, four storeys of it, unmistakably the largest thing on the hillside. It also explains a piece of the property’s history far better than any amount of reading could: the site began as a Benedictine monastery, and Saracen pirates raided it so persistently that the monks abandoned it altogether in the sixteenth century. Sitting offshore looking up at it, you understand exactly what they were looking at.
The water is a deep green blue rather than the transparent turquoise of the tropics, and there are places along the coast to stop and swim. There is a restaurant near the lighthouse that came recommended and that we simply ran out of time for, which is the recurring problem here. Portofino is tiny, and there is still more of it than three days will allow.
Lunch at DaV Mare, and a bottle that spent months on the seabed
Splendido Mare, the sister property, sits down on the same square with just 14 rooms, and its restaurant, DaV Mare, is a partnership between Belmond and the Cerea family behind the three-Michelin-starred Da Vittorio. It is a trattoria di pesce in the truest sense, built entirely around whatever the harbour landed that morning, and lunch there was one of the happiest meals of the trip.
A procession of starters came first: shrimp, scallops with tomato and olives, lobster, cod and crisp anchovies. The anchovies and the scallops were the standouts with the lobster close behind, and what struck us was that freshness rather than technique was doing most of the work. With a table full of small dishes everything arrived on a variety of stands so there was room to move, and each plate had already been divided precisely for the number of people sitting there.
Then came the pasta, and a serving ritual worth travelling for on its own. Mezzo Paccheri alla DaV arrived in a large copper pan in exactly the right quantity for the table, with bibs handed round because the tomato sauce is not remotely shy. Two of you are served onto plates, and the last person is given the pan itself along with the remaining sauce and bread to finish it, which makes going last a genuine privilege rather than a penalty. Trofie di Recco followed with Prà basil pesto, loosened at the table with a little pasta water and finished with a drizzle of very good olive oil.
The wine was the discovery of the whole trip, and it deserves explaining properly. Bisson’s Abissi is a metodo classico sparkling wine under the Portofino DOC, made from indigenous Ligurian grapes: Bianchetta Genovese, Vermentino and Cimixià. What sets it apart is where the second fermentation is allowed to finish. The bottles are lowered in steel cages onto the seabed of the Baia del Silenzio at Sestri Levante, roughly 60 metres down, where the temperature stays at around 15 degrees and the currents rock them gently instead of a cellarman turning them by hand. They rest there for a minimum of 18 months, under something like seven bar of sea pressure pushing in against the pressure of the wine pushing out and are then disgorged with no sugar dosage at all.
They come back up encrusted with marine growth and are served exactly as they emerged, unwashed and protected by a thin film, so the theatre begins before anyone has poured anything. In the glass it is straw gold with a fine and persistent bead, saline on the nose and relentlessly mineral through the finish. It is not, whatever anyone tells you, prosecco, and calling it that undersells it considerably. We have been hunting for a bottle ever since we came home, which is more or less the entire argument for travelling.
Dinner at La Terrazza, with a cocktail list built from songs
La Terrazza is the main restaurant, a long room running most of the length of that floor with the bar at one end, and its retractable roof stays closed through breakfast and lunch to keep the sun off. The timing of dinner is quietly brilliant. Seatings begin at 7pm, which is exactly when the sun drops behind the headland, and as the roof draws back you are left with a sky that is still completely bright but with no direct glare at all. Everything looks better in that light, the food and the company included.
The drinks list arrives on a menu cut into the shape of a piano, with a movable strip you slide across the ‘keys’ to mark your choice, and every cocktail is paired with a song. A pianist plays through the evening from that same list, so the drink in your hand and the music in the room share a reference, which is the sort of idea that could easily have been twee and is instead completely charming. Our Love in Portofino, named for the Buscaglione standard, came in a wide bowl hand-painted in the harbour’s own colours, reds and yellows with green at the edges. The other was a Bellini rebuilt as something clarified and still, peach-led and closer to an iced tea in texture, considerably stronger than it let on, served in a goblet with a woven blue glass stem.
And then the room gave us something no hotel could ever plan. There are guests here who stay for weeks at a time, and one of them, in the middle of a conversation with us, simply got up, walked over and sang while the pianist played. Nobody found it remotely odd. People who love Portofino seem to recognise one another, and this hotel has been the setting for that recognition for a very long time.
Dinner began with bubbles. A Dom Pérignon Rosé was offered first, and when we asked what else there might be, a Ruinart Blanc de Blancs appeared instead, poured from the bottle raised almost to the ceiling, which is theatre of the very best kind. Chef Corrado Corti’s Fassona beef tartare had been chopped rather than minced and seasoned lightly enough for the beef to come through, with black truffle from Val d’Aveto shaved over the top and egg yolk gel and mustard placed at separate points around the plate so that every mouthful can be built a little differently.
The Gnocchi alla Zucca di Rocchetta was the dish of the stay, pumpkin gnocchi with sage, butter and black truffle from Val di Vara, and it was gone in what felt like seconds. Salt cod followed with fagioli di Pigna and rosemary oil, cooked so gently that it came apart in sheets. Every sharing plate arrived already divided, which is a small courtesy that changes the whole rhythm of a meal. Dessert is a spread rather than a menu, laid out in the same space used for breakfast, with cheeses, lemon tart, tiramisù and small cakes to pick at for as long as you like.
The Elizabeth Taylor pasta, and the difference between nostalgia and ritual
La Terrazza opens for lunch as well, and this is where the hotel’s most famous dish belongs. We took a corner table with the best of the view and ordered almost nothing else, just a glass of local wine and the homage to Elizabeth Taylor.
The connection runs deep. Miss Taylor came here through the fifties and sixties, married eight times across her life, and by the hotel’s own account was proposed to twice on these very terraces and returned for four of her honeymoons. Her photographs hang in the lobby. Her signature sits in the golden book alongside a century of others, and that book is not on display anywhere: it lives in a vault, unphotographed, which strikes us as a far more confident piece of curation than putting it behind glass in a corridor.
For all the diamonds and the drama, what she wanted from the kitchen was pasta with tomato sauce, and it has stayed on the menu ever since. The version served today is Verrigni Spaghett’Oro with a trio of tomatoes, Prà basil and gold. Successive chefs have been allowed their own reading of it, but the integrity of the original is treated as non-negotiable. Three varieties of tomato are slow roasted over a long stretch to build the sauce, with some cherry tomatoes held back whole so there are still bites of intact fruit, and others dried down to something between fresh and sundried, which gives the dish two textures and a deep sweetness running underneath. The spaghetti is thick and cooked hard al dente, the sauce is smooth and completely without chunks, and a little very good olive oil is the only finishing it needs. They will offer you parmesan, and we would gently suggest going without.
“The difference between nostalgia and ritual is that nostalgia means looking back, reflecting on something. A ritual is something you can still do. And this one you can eat.”
That is the clearest possible summary of what separates Splendido, A Belmond Hotel, Portofino from other very good hotels. A great many properties have their history on the walls. Almost none of them let you sit down and take part in it, and no amount of money builds that from scratch.
Breakfast, focaccia in cappuccino, and the way they let you leave
One morning we were awake before half past five, long before any service had begun, and wanted nothing in the world but coffee. Not only was it no trouble, it came with a suggestion: dunk your focaccia into the cappuccino, the way it is done in Liguria. Salty bread against unsweetened coffee being very much a matter of temperament, but the offer was the point. That is a hotel handing you a place rather than a service.
Breakfast proper is among the best we have had anywhere. The buffet is deliberately small and beautifully composed, with pastries on one side, fruit and yoghurt on another, and then the section that really earns it: cherry tomatoes, fresh burrata, aged balsamic and seriously good olive oil. There is a member of staff whose entire job appears to be toasting bread, and he does it beautifully. The à la carte menu runs long enough that a week here would never repeat itself, with a range of egg preparations including a scrambled Benedict variation. There is champagne at that hour for anyone who wants it, and we were pleasantly surprised to spot a neighbouring table on red wine at 9am.
The departure was handled with the same intelligence as everything else. We had checked out and stayed on through sunset at the pool, and when it was finally time to change there was a full changing room waiting, with showers, toiletries, creams and a hairdryer. Being able to leave a hotel properly dressed after an entire extra afternoon of it transforms a last day, and almost nobody thinks to build it. Turndown had left a luggage tag, which has since joined a prized collection at home. There was cold water waiting in the car and a box of local biscuits, which did not survive the onward drive.
Is Splendido, A Belmond Hotel, Portofino worth it?
Wholeheartedly, with one piece of advice attached: give it at least three nights. This is a hotel of corners rather than headline attractions, and every one of them deserves more than a single visit. Play the tennis court twice, use the outdoor gym more than once, take the boat, walk down for gelato, and keep a whole day free for doing very little at all beside the pool. Two nights would force choices that nobody should have to make here.
Splendido offers what simply cannot be commissioned: a monastery turned family villa turned hotel, a view that has barely changed in five centuries, a kitchen still serving a dish ordered by a film star sixty years ago, and a team who read a room faster than almost anyone. Having now stayed, the conclusion is a simpler one. You can build a more expensive hotel. You cannot rebuild this one.
