The primary time my household went to Caruso, which is an Eleventh-century property in Ravello at a summit within the Lattari Mountains that overlooks a 1,000-foot-plus plunge to the Tyrrhenian Sea, my son Henry was nearly six months previous. It was late April, and Amalfi’s lemon timber have been blossoming. The lodge, an austerely lovely, scrubbed limestone palace clinging to the aspect of a hill, was an appealingly straightforward escape. We carried cups of wealthy, not-too-sweet Sfusato Amalfitano lemonade into the grounds. Gardens organized with lawns, rose borders, half-­hid hammocks, and citrus timber fanned beneath the palace like big steps. Wisteria vines dropped petals from the pergolas, outshone by the punch-pink, first-bloom bougainvillea. We slept within the lodge’s Villa Margherita, designed by Eric Egan. I think about artists who travelled to Ravello within the early twentieth century staying right here as they waited for inspiration to strike. Considered one of us opened a set of floor-to-ceiling home windows, exposing a transparent sweep from the coastal slopes of Maiori to Minori, with the chapel-dotted uplands of the Lattaris rising in each instructions, and the improbably empty Mediterranean filling within the horizon. It’s a view nothing can put together you for.

Final Could, my husband, Andrew, and I went again to the identical villa with the cowrie-shell chandelier. We aren’t within the behavior of repeating journeys, however we each stored citing that lemonade. I used to be seven months pregnant with our second son, and if I needed to be benched someplace with a pack of antacids – nicely, what a spot. We mooched across the pool, an adults-only place in spirit if not by decree, edged on three sides by inexperienced hills and by the shoreline to the south. Shallow terra-cotta bowls, filled with pansies, sat alongside large white umbrellas, vast sufficient to shade two solar loungers on the patio or, even higher, on the mushy garden dented with ice buckets. On some days we by no means went farther than the poolside restaurant, the place we ordered scrape-the-plate paccheri with burst cherry tomatoes, and eggplant Parmesan that got here in a puddle of shiny passata.

Meals – and the leisurely consuming of it – was the tentpole of our return to Caruso. We hovered over breakfast for an hour every morning, scooping up rosemary omelettes and fried tomatoes with troopers of focaccia, tart rounds of caprese al limone, and sfogliatelle santarosa, my favorite, a shell-shaped pastry crammed with raspberries and cream. Within the afternoons we might stroll into city previous the duomo for hazelnut and pistachio cones from Baffone Gelateria Artigianale, and within the evenings we stayed on the lodge – a alternative that normally would have smacked of laziness to me, however as a substitute felt decadently unambitious.

As I’m penning this, the infant is due in a few weeks, and I hope our second journey finally ends up being the beginning of one thing. I hope we’ll return to Caruso as a household of 4, and open the home windows in that villa, and keep in mind why we preserve coming again. From about £814. Jo Rodgers