What began as the Sersale family's private summer residence has never really stopped feeling like one. Le Sirenuse, the 58-room hotel carved from an eighteenth-century palazzo cascading down Positano's cliffside, was converted by the family themselves in 1951 and has remained in their hands ever since — a continuity that shapes everything from the collection of antique prints on the bedroom walls to the way terracotta pots spilling with bougainvillea punctuate every terrace balustrade. The building's distinctive crimson and white facade, with its arched loggias and wrought-iron balconies picked out in scrolling ironwork, gives the property an identity so specific to this stretch of the Amalfi Coast that it has become, for many, the visual shorthand for Positano itself. Inside, the interiors maintain the atmosphere of an inherited home assembled over generations rather than designed in a single act. Rooms are furnished with gilded four-poster beds draped in ikat and blue-and-white printed fabrics, their floors laid in traditional Vietri ceramic tiles in geometric patterns of cobalt and cream. Antique marquetry commodes and oil portraits of Neapolitan noblemen anchor the suites in a southern Italian domestic tradition. The pool terrace, dressed with lemon trees in oversized terracotta urns and teak sun loungers set against majolica-tiled paving, opens to an uninterrupted view across the Tyrrhenian toward Li Galli — the islands that, legend holds, were once home to Homer's sirens.

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Le Sirenuse is a wonderful place from which to enjoy the simple pleasures of Positano and the spectacular Amalfi Coast. John Steinbeck, who visited in 1953, wrote 'Positano bites deep. It is a dream place that isn't quite real when you are there and becomes beckoningly real after you have gone.'