A hotel that has spent two hundred years taking care of people
Newly single in one of the most romantic places on earth, I left the Grand Hotel Excelsior Vittoria changed
Ed. note: This stay was hosted by Grand Hotel Excelsior Vittoria. As always, I only share experiences that I genuinely love, and all opinions and recommendations are entirely my own.
Six months ago, my marriage ended. Before that, passport stamps were always collected in pairs, and destinations visited were joint decisions. Traveling internationally alone was a novel idea.
And somehow, the first time I did it just a couple of weeks ago, I ended up in Sorrento, Italy. Which is, by any measure, one of the most romantic places on earth. I sat with that irony for about five minutes. But then I arrived at the Grand Hotel Excelsior Vittoria. And arrival at a place like that feels grand, indeed.
What separates the Excelsior Vittoria from every other hotel I have ever stayed in is not the view, though that alone is extraordinary. It is not the age, though 1834 is a long time to be doing anything. It is the Fiorentinos: a family who have been running this place for generations, who greet you in the way that people do when they’ve spent lifetimes learning that what a guest needs most is rarely what they say.
I arrived at the hotel on a Thursday morning in late April. It occupies a unique geography: perched on the cliffside above the harbor, yet somehow also in the heart of everything, Piazza Tasso humming just beyond its gates. You walk through ornate iron gates and into a garden, the air fragrant with jasmine, paths meandering past statues until suddenly, you’re rewarded with that view: The Bay of Naples, Vesuvius on the horizon, the whole sweep of the Amalfi coast curving away to the east. After a punishing nine-hour red-eye flight in economy, the sight was legtimately healing.
The Excelsior Vittoria opened in 1834, which means it was already twenty years old when Enrico Caruso arrived. He would return many times, eventually staying for months at a time, so enchanted by the place that they named a suite for him and hung his portrait in the lobby. Then came Wagner, Umberto I, Princess Margaret, Oscar Wilde. The hotel has a guestbook that reads like a history book, one that accretes in layers: one famous guest, then another, then a century of ordinary ones carrying their own stories through the same corridors, until the walls absorb something that newer properties simply don’t have.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately—what age does to a hotel. There’s a quality that the very old ones share, something that goes beyond the antique furniture and the archive of photographs, something more like emotional load-bearing capacity. A place that has been receiving guests since before the unification of Italy has, by definition, absorbed every version of a life. Heartbreak and honeymoon. First trip and last one. Arrivals made in triumph and arrivals made in ruins. The Excelsior Vittoria doesn’t need to know your particular story, because it has most likely held every kind of version of it before. Something about that accumulated witnessing becomes its own form of hospitality.
The days I spent there had a shape that felt almost deliberate in their generosity. Breakfast in the impossibly ornate Ristorante Vittoria, meats and cheeses and fruits and pastries piled high on plates. A resorative massage to melt away the jet-lag at the spa, La Serra, which took place by candlelight in a converted 19th-century greenhouse. Dinner at Terrazza Bosquet, the hotel’s Michelin-starred restaurant, where each course was more intricate than the last.
My room was on the fourth floor, with a terrace overlooking lush gardens and the hotel's dramatic umbrella trees. Inside: high ceilings, antique furniture, the kind of room that could easily have coasted on its history and called it a day. Instead it was genuinely, surprisingly comfortable: Dyson hairdryers and Steamery steamers (with bottled water provided) and—this is my personal favorite—enough different lighting configurations that I actually found the right one to set the vibe I wanted. Getting the lighting right in a hotel room is, in my experience, genuinely rare. The property is a member of Leading Hotels of the World, which matters less as a status signal and more as a philosophy indicator: independently owned, deeply particular, allergic to the kind of brand homogenization that makes you forget which city you're in. They grow their own lemons, make their own jam. There's olive oil with the hotel's name on it, and take it from me—it’s good enough to buy a second bag or pay the overweight luggage fee for.
In the evenings, the Fiorentino sons took us into town—to places that don’t make it into itineraries, the kind of local knowledge you only get if someone who grew up here decides to share it. We ate and drank and walked down cobblestones and somewhere in the middle of it I stopped mentally noting things to write down and just existed in it. But the best day was on the boat.
Friday morning, we took the hotel’s private elevator straight down to the bay to board a Riva yacht with the whole family. The further the coastline receded, the more champagne we poured, the louder the music got. Lunch was at Conca del Sogno: spaghetti alla Nerano, eaten on a cliff above the Bay of Ieranto, followed by profiteroles I had to physically restrain myself from finishing. At one point I turned to Guido and yelled over the music, “this is the best day of my life!”
I meant it.
Sorrento is, objectively, one of the most romantic places I’ve ever been. I had known this before I arrived. I wondered to myself what it would feel like to be there alone, six months out of the longest relationship of my adult life, on my first trip to Italy. The answer, it turned out, was: fine! More than fine. The view from the yacht is the same view regardless of who’s in the seat next to you. The water is the same color.
There is a particular solitude that comes from being somewhere beautiful alone. You notice things without having someone who intimately knows your inner world to narrate them to. Things like how the color of the light on the water at 6pm makes you feel, or what memories the smell of orange blossom in the garden after dark evokes from your childhood.
I went to the Excelsior Vittoria at an unexpected moment, carrying the particular weight of a life that had recently—quite dramatically—changed shape. I used to be scared to do things alone. But I got on a plane to Europe by myself for the first time, ended up in one of the most romantic places on earth, and had what felt like the best day of my life. And somewhere over the Atlantic on the way home, watching the clouds as I always do, I understood that it was only the first of many.
Tori Simokov is a Travel Writer and Graphic Designer/Strategist based in New York. To get in touch, email tori@v1projects.com. Want more? Check out Instagram, TikTok, or shop her curated favorites.