Il San Pietro di Positano

Il San Pietro di Positano is a five-star hotel on Italy's Amalfi Coast, set on a headland known locally as La Punta in the Laurito district, about two kilometres south of Positano. The hotel is still a family affair: it is owned and run by Virginia Attanasio and her sons Vito and Carlo Cinque, and it has belonged to Relais & Châteaux since 1989.

La Liste places it among the ten hotels that share the top spot in its 2026 world ranking, each scoring 99.5 out of 100. A year earlier it was fifth on La Liste's 2025 list of the ten best hotels in the world. The hotel was also voted eighth-best hotel in Italy in the 2016 Readers' Choice Awards.

The hotel is the life's work of Carlo "Carlino" Cinque, who bought the cliff-top promontory with its small 17th-century chapel of San Pietro in 1962. Acting as his own architect, engineer and interior designer, he spent eight years blasting through the rock to install a lift that runs from the lobby, 88 metres up, down to a tunnel and a seaside sunbathing platform. The hotel opened on 29 June 1970 with 33 rooms, and Cinque threaded vines through walls and ceilings so that the gardens would grow indoors.

Today the rooms and gardens spread over nearly a dozen levels, with views of the sea, of Positano or of the village of Praiano. Its Zass restaurant won a Michelin star in 2002, the year the spa opened in a former farm building, and the sea-level Carlino restaurant followed in 2008. Guests over the decades have included Richard Burton, Barbra Streisand, Tina Turner and Julia Roberts, and L'Artisien recalls evenings when stars would "sing around the piano".