A room with a view

I think I’ve died and gone to heaven. Well, a heaven populated with good-looking Italians, blue skies from sunrise to dusk, street stalls offering lemon granita and the best tasting cherry tomatoes, and restaurants that serve buffalo mozzarella for lunch and fresh zucchini flowers stuffed with ricotta for dinner. Every day I wake up, stroll out onto the sunny terrace lined with pots of golden lantana, and pinch myself. But it’s all true: Positano in Italy rocks!
I’m staying in a hotel described on the internet as having its own “botanical garden”. Usually I’d consider that webspeak for “a cheap dive with a small patio filled with geraniums in terracotta pots and an obligatory citrus or two”. But Palazzo Murat in Positano, on the Amalfi Coast near Naples, is sheer bliss. This 18th century palace was once the summer residence for Napoleon Bonaparte's brother-in-law (then the King of Naples... and its garden is gorgeous. So gorgeous that I’m wondering if they need a Kiwi apprentice to help out next summer…
The hotel’s breakfast buffet is shaded by a huge Chorisia speciosa, one of my favourite trees of all time, its trunk armour-plated with fat spines. In summer it produces pink flowers like Oriental lilies. It’s such a star, but quite hard to find in New Zealand. (I think Russell Fransham stocks it, and Wairere Nurseries in West Auckland used to offer it). From the breakfast patio, the main restaurant area is lined with cacti and succulents, bouganvillea drips off the terraces, there are tropical treasures – hibiscus, bananas, brugmansias – and best of all, there are fruit trees: figs, guavas, lemons, oranges, and even a feijoa.
The hotel even has its own thriving vege plot with rows of gourmet lettuces, cherry tomatoes, Roma tomatoes and big, fat, healthy looking basil plants. They’re the size of small shrubs. Bellissimo!