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Mazzarò Sea Palace
Taormina, Italy · VRetreats · Core Luxury
Mazzaro bay is a crescent of pebble and very deep blue under the cliffs below Taormina, and only two hotels open straight onto it. This is one of them. It started as a villa built on the rock and grew into a grand hotel; there are 70 rooms and suites now, eight of them with their own pools, and every one has a terrace facing the water. You check in on the top floor and ride down to sea level. Riccardo Fazio cooks in both restaurants, including BLUM, where the tables sit out over the bay.
- 70 rooms
- Neighborhood: Mazzarò
About Mazzarò Sea Palace
- BLUM serves only twelve covers a night and entered the Michelin Guide in 2025. Fazio builds menus around near-lost Sicilian ingredients such as Tuma Persa, a cheese that almost disappeared.
- The only other hotel with direct access to Mazzaro bay is Villa Sant'Andrea, A Belmond Hotel. Everybody else comes down from the coast road.
- The cable car up to Taormina's old town leaves from a stop a few minutes' walk along the shore and runs every fifteen minutes.
History
The building began as a villa raised on the cliff above Mazzaro bay and was enlarged into a grand hotel in the decades after the war. Sources disagree on the date: Frommer's has the hotel completed in 1962, other listings put the opening in 1972, and the Italian press describes a villa converted into a grand hotel in the 1970s. What is not in dispute is the trick of the place, which is that you arrive at the top and descend to the sea. Registration happens on the fourth floor, level with the coast road, and the lift takes you down through the rock to the marble-floored public rooms and the private beach.
The hotel now trades as part of the VRetreats collection, the luxury line of VOIhotels within Alpitour World, and is a member of The Leading Hotels of the World. A refurbishment of the 70 rooms and suites was followed by a redesign of the lobby, restaurants and terraces, working in hand-painted tiles, sea urchin and octopus ceramics and glass fishermen's lanterns. Eight of the suites have private pools. The kitchens are run by the young Sicilian chef Riccardo Fazio across two restaurants, Armonia on the panoramic terrace and BLUM, the fine-dining room with tables suspended over the water.
The setting
Mazzaro is the bay directly below Taormina, once a fishing village and now the town's seafront. Its name is thought to come from an Arabic root that recurs across Sicily. The water shelves off fast, which is why it is so blue so close to shore, and a rocky promontory sits in the middle of the inlet. Isola Bella lies just around the headland to the south. The old town is about four kilometres away by road, but the cable car climbs it in a couple of minutes, and most of the hotel's guests use that instead of a taxi.
Amenities
- Tailor-made event creation via request form
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