Travel Blog - Mr & Mrs Smith Boutique & Luxury Hotels

While it’s a bit miserable and dark (well, it’s winter, innit), we thought we’d brighten your day with tales from a sunnier isle – Sicily.

As you know, every time we publish a new hotel write-up from one of our panel of independent reviewers at Mr & Mrs Smith, we’ll let you know, so you can keep pace with our team of travel spies and style insiders on their global roams. Every property in our hand-picked hotel collection is reviewed by a real-life couple, so we can make sure every bed is beautiful, every breakfast delectable, and every night romantic (as well as super-stylish).

Anyhoo: here’s some feedback from our anonymous Mr & Mrs Smiths after their recent visit to gorgeous coastal countryside farmhouse Azienda Agricola Mandranova in Sicily…

If I had a pound for every hotel I’ve Googled upon with a guffy line exclaiming ‘home away from home!’, I wouldn’t be a journalist any more. But this Italian retreat nails it. It’s the smiling Giuseppe upon arrival that sets the tone, letting guests know that they matter. Although there are a handful of other cars in the drive, variously hired at Catania or Palermo airports, we can’t see anyone else.

One of the perks of the Mandranova’s semi-isolated location on Sicily’s southern coast is the obligatory adventure en route. Italian motorways are some of the best in the business… and we get rather carried away. The basic directions instruct us to turn left somewhere near the southern coast. Mesmerised, we opt for an hour-long three-point turn around southwestern Sicily.

And when we arrive… that smile. Giuseppe takes us on a brief tour of this magnificent farmhouse property. Blanketing the hefty acreage are thousands of the olive trees that yield Mandranova’s prize-winning oil. Whereas other corners of this island can seem scorched and lava-scarred, here there is an almost lush richness. The farmhouse is the centrepiece; an imposing white-walled building staggered in height and arranged with a distinct geometric beauty – a softer take, perhaps, on the ancient Parthenon at Agrigento, half an hour to the west of the property…

Interest piqued? You can book a room or read the full review (and find out who the anonymous reviewer was) on the Mr & Mrs Smith website…

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 18th, 2008 at 1:08 pm and is filed under Independent reviews, Italy, Sicily, Uncategorized. You can follow any comments on this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.