reopens as luxury hotel – three years after sale...For 35 years, until [Franco Zeffirelli] sold it in 2007... estate's links with the arts go back to the 1920s...Guests will even be able to browse through the books [Zeffirelli] left behind...bought by a local hotel owner, Giovanni Russo [owner of Sorrento Palace and Bellevue Syrene]...an eccentric greenhouse, made from part of the set for one of Zeffirelli's productions of La Traviata, had been kept and adapted for use as accommodation...

Zeffirelli's...collection of 18th-century Caltagirone pottery is set into ceramic niches above the fireplace... staffed by long-serving employees of Signor Russo; the vegetables come from the garden cultivated by Zeffirelli, seafood is supplied fresh by the hotel's fisherman...highest of the villas is several hundred feet below the coast road...traffic noise is non-existent

when Julian Schnabel stayed here recently, he paid tribute to a long-lost artist friend from Positano by painting the words HUMANITY ASLEEP over a traditional Sicilian puppet-theater backdrop in one of the living rooms.