These are the places that can nearly outshine Elizabeth Taylor’s love of Burmese sapphires and pear-shaped diamonds. Pay homage to the screen siren’s favourite glamorous hotspots and revel in these stratospherically luxurious addresses in some of the most glamorous cities in the world. If you are going to be proposed to at a hotel, then this is surely the place to do it.
Which is what happened to Elizabeth Taylor, in suite 471 when Richard Burton popped the question with an emerald Bulgari brooch. It’s all the way, wherever you turn at Italy’s most glamorous monastery-hotel, which has pedigree and panache in spades – and that’s nowhere better exemplified than at La Terrazza, where there is even a pasta pomodoro named in Taylor’s honour. Its longstanding star-chef Corrado Corti uses three types of tomato: San Marzano, Sorrento and Pachino.
Afterwards, slink off to the Jardin des Rêves Dior spa: a pop-up, green toile de Jouy temple of joy, passing through gardens with a statement saltwater pool, to a shaded gazebo where the therapist Juliana will prise your shoulders from your ears and slather you in Dior products. Come bellini-hour on the terrace, there are always several European tycoons eyeing up the top table, while soulful crooner Vladi tinkers away on his piano. But you may prefer to hop on the hotel’s Dior Vespa and navigate hairpin roads down to the port for negronis at Dav Mare (the illustrious restaurant of sister hotel Splendido Mare).
The Dorcheste.