HOLIDAYS & TRAVEL

Mezzogiorno ... ••• Brian Inglis You See Me Old and Fat . . . Peter Mayne The Other Riviera •.• ... St. John Donn-Byrne Coach Touring ... Harold Champion Mezzogiorno -

By BRIAN INGLIS

ISUPPOSE most of us who go south for summer holidays indulge in a day-dream occasionally during the winter, about an ideal hotel: one which would fulfil all our personal specifications.

I was beginning to think that my own ideal—I do not know how widely it is shared—was never going to be realised. Maybe I was setting tlie specifications too high? Yet they did not seem unreasonable : 1. The hotel should be in Italy.

2. It should not be in a town (I cannot understand how people can enjoy staying in Positano, let alone San Remo or Venice, in the summer).

3. It should be on the sea (the Italian lakes are fine, but their weather is uncertain).

4. It should be self-contained—that is, guests should be able to get down to the beach dressed for the occasion, without having to use bathing boxes, for which I have an unconquerable aver- sion.

5. It should be sufficiently little-known to give the pleasant sensation of discovery.

6. It should have a good chef.

7. Its rooms should have terraces overlooking the sea. To this list I would earlier have added :

8. It should not be too expensive —but owing to the difficulty in finding such a place, I had grown reconciled to the fact that it would hardly be cheap. The trouble was it did not seem to exist, at any price. Some hotels I came across fulfilled most of the conditions, but not all of them. It was not until last summer that the dream was at last embodied on all counts by the Santavenere Hotel, at Maratea.

Maratea is on the Gulf of Policastro, about 100 miles south of Naples—a good deal farther south, that is, than the Sorrento peninsula, which is normally as far south as tourists go, unless they are going all the way through to Sicily. This 'Mezzogiorno' coast is hardly known, even to Italians. Yet it is extremely attractive, with moun- tains sloping down to the Mediterranean, and a coastal road more beautiful, and almost as frightening, as the run from Sorrento to Positano.

The colours, particularly in early summer, are very striking. How the Gulf has remained un- populated is inexplicable, but apart from the Santavenere and one or two antiseptic but charac- terless 'Jolly' hotels a visitor is hard put to find anywhere to stay (or was : I doubt if he will re- main so unaccommodated much longer).

The Santavenere is a delight. It is admittedly not cheap: I would prefer less exalted standards of service and lower charges; but there it is. I have not seen this year's tariff; in 1958 a full pension was around £3 10s. a day which with nor- mal extras and service charges works out at little less than £5 a day. With English-style rounds of dry martinis at the bar, of course, and Riviera pleasures such as water ski-ing, this could easily be doubled.

But the great virtue of the place is that there is no incentive to do anything active; and indeed there is precious little to do of any kind. Even walking is discouraged by the steepness of the mountainsides; the Italians have not mastered the German art of path-making. There are no cafds worthy of the name; and no restaurants (though one was due to open, and another had just closed owing to the death of the chef). Perhaps there is more activity in the height of the season, but that is a bad time to go anyway : April-May, Septem- ber-October are reputedly the best months. This is not much good for families with children of school age, but I did not get the impression that it would make a good family hotel. It is better, I imagine, for people trying to get away from their families for a change; or from work; or from other people.

The cooking is excellent, and the local wines are pleasant; in fact the sole snag that I can remember (apart from things which are endemic in Italy—the painful string of taxes and service charges on the hotel bill, and the equally painful ntedusa, colony that floated in on my last day) was the mattresses, of all things; mine resembled nothing so much as an old army 'biscuit.'

There remains the risk, of course, that the hotel will be taken up and Edenrocketed into a preserve of the surtax bracket. But for the present, I think, this is improbable. It is too far away from company, for one thing; the kind of people who enjoy the privacy of a select hotel at Cap Ferrat would enjoy it much less if they did not have Nice round the corner. In fact, the people who are likely to enjoy the Santavenere are the people who have suffered, and are escaping from, the tyranny of the Cote d'Azur—who are prepared to pay quite a lot for their summer holiday, but who want to be certain they are going to get their money's worth, and not be trimmed a is Francaise. If the. Santavenere keeps up to last year's stand- ard they will not be disappointed.