CARUSO

Famed for restoring historic properties, Belmond luxury?hotel group is now collaborating with world-leading contemporary photographers to create bodies of work responding to their destinations, carefully pairing each artist with the personality of the chosen hotel. Letizia Le Fur photographed Caruso, on the Amalfi Coast in autumn 2022, and spring 2024. Caruso has a history that goes back almost a thousand years, and there is a certain genius in the way Le Fur depicts its architecture against the glowing hills and towering cliffs of this most iconic stretch of Italy's coastline. The reliefs appear almost flat, like a Renaissance trompe l'oeil fresco, or a stage set for A Midsummer Night's Dream, where one could simply step out and glide across their surface. The gardens could have been plucked straight from a Hayao Miyazaki fantasy. It was quite intentional for these photographs to reinforce the dreamlike, timeless aspect of the place. Le Fur sought to capture what she calls the 'omnipresent sun' - the buttery light that drenches the 11th-century walls and cliffside gardens. It is this singular observation that drives the book; every subject Le Fur captures is soaked in a luminescence that plays a character in several acts, and it is the sun's kaleidoscopic theatrics that form the heart of the story. (...)