Hotel Loreley et Londres

The Hotel Loreley et Londres is one of the Secret Hotels of the Amalfi Coast, a tattered olde worlde budget gem in Sorrento

Hotel Loreley et Londres
Via Califano 12
Sorrento
tel. +39-081-807-3187
www.sorrentohotelmignon.com/loreley.htm
Open Easter-Oct
Doubles €95

The 100-year-old Loreley is an Old World pensione with a spectacular setting: a dusty rose building clinging to the cliff above the Marina Piccola port.

There are hints of past glory throughout—dingy plaster moldings on the walls, inlaid stone tile floors—but overall it's on the downward arc of a slow, easygoing decline into shabbiness. The cracks in the ceiling are clumsily plastered, the name painted on the façade is flaking off, and the rooms are a decidedly mixed bag: elaborate hand-painted floor tiles with hideous pea-green modular furnishings, or shocking pink floors with a mix of battered antiques.

None of that matters, though, when you fling open the doors to the your balcony (or, in rooms 11 to 15, small terrace) and are hit with that panorama over the busy ferry harbor to Sorrento's cliffs. You get the same vista from the shaded terrace restaurant—which is fine for cocktails, but avoid the one-step-above-Boyardee food. Though it's been in the guidebooks for years, the Loreley's location 15 minutes from the heart of town keeps it from jacking up prices.

Each morning, the breakfast room fills with pennywise travelers: British vacationers planning for tomorrow, American families chatting about yesterday's adventures, older Italian couples downing their simple continental breakfast in austere silence, and backpackers debating whether to make a daytrip to Pompeii or just take the elevator down to the private swimming pier again and maybe later head into town to score free limoncello samples from the shops and watch old men play cards under frescoed porticos.

[NOTE: This hotel was closed in 2007 for an overhaul by its new owners—which means I have no idea what it will be like when it reopens. Will it remain a tattered budget gem, or be transformed (as so many old favorites are) into a blandly overpriced three-star hotel? Anybody's guess. Contact the Hotel Mignon for more information: www.sorrentohotelmignon.com]

» More hotels along the Amalfi Coast

 

The Travel Store

 

Hotels on the Amalfi Coast

Destinations Africa Asia Australia / South Pacific Caribbean Europe North America South / Central America Worldwide / General