According to the hotel, Francis Ford Coppola asked Richard Manley in 1971 to host part of the cast of The Godfather at the villa for about six weeks. Al Pacino, not yet well known, was among them.
The house's story began earlier, when Robert Trewhella came to Sicily in the late 1800s to help build the Circumetnea railway. He started a summer house on Mazzarò Bay, and his son, Alfred Percy, finished it in 1919. More than a century later, the hotel still sits on that small, steep-sided bay, a few steps from the Isola Bella nature reserve.
The family's link lasted five generations and ended in 1985. From the 1960s the hotel drew Sicilian society and the film people in town for the Taormina festival; the hotel names Burt Lancaster, Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor and Peter O'Toole among its guests. Belmond took over in 2010 and added a pool over the bay, a beach club and an additional wing.
Arriving
Come down from Taormina by cable car, by the hotel shuttle or by the road that drops to the seafront, and the hotel appears as a long white curve of terraces above the rocks and the bay. The shuttle also runs back up to Grand Hotel Timeo, the sister hotel in town, for the terrace views of Mount Etna and the Greek Theatre next door.
The lobby sits at the top, so a stay here is a descent: the 66 rooms, the pool and the beach step away below it. Look up and there is a 1950s-style chandelier over Margherita chairs, and a fabric screen printed with orange trees. The room to linger in is Gwendoline's Bar, the villa's former living room. Gio Ponti is the reference, the counter is faced in blue lava-stone tiles made for the hotel in a shade meant to echo the sea outside, and the art includes work by Alessandro Florio, who was born in Taormina.
Down to the water
The terrace of Ristorante Sant'Andrea looks over the bay, and from there the way leads down past the pool to the beach. At Lido Villeggiatura the loungers and umbrellas are striped blue and white, the beach bar counter carries more Etna lava stone, and six cabanas come with their own veranda and butler service. When a cocktail is too much, the beach bar makes a granita.
The hotel also keeps a private boat, an 11-metre Apreamare Gozzo 35 for up to 12 guests, for half-day and full-day trips to Isola Bella, the Cyclopean Islands and as far as Siracusa. On land, it arranges a tasting of Etna wines by the Circumetnea railway, the line Trewhella helped build, and a clam lunch in Ganzirri near Messina.
Dinner
Brizza is the one to book: a pieds dans l'eau restaurant on the beach with just eight tables in the evening, three tasting menus called Mare, Terra and Radici, and Etna wines aged at sea. Ristorante Sant'Andrea, on the terrace over the bay, is the everyday table, with swordfish and sardines, ricotta cannoli and a fish couscous from the recipe of executive chef Agostino D'Angelo's grandmother in Trapani. It is the dish he says he leaves unchanged.
For something looser, Brace Grill at Bar Sant'Andrea runs from noon to midnight with a Josper grill, pizza, raw and marinated fish, and live jazz on the evening terrace.
The bar
Gwendoline's Bar is named after a member of the Manley family, and its cocktails arrive in British-style cups and glasses, a small English habit kept on a Sicilian bay. Out on the sea-view terrace, Bar Sant'Andrea serves an aperitivo with canapés and changes its drinks list every year under bar manager Fabio Rosella.
