About half way along the Sicily’s North Coast is Cefalu, and just a little fur­ther is the tiny vil­lage of Castel di Tusa which at first glance has little to offer; a bar emit­ting pop music and the whiff of a typ­ical café kit­chen, a few fishing boats pulled up on the har­bour front, a coach of school­chil­dren. Except it hap­pens to be home to one of the most extraordinary hotels you are ever likely to check into. Atelier sul Mare is the brainchild of Antonio Presti, who had the insane idea that guests would travel miles off the beaten track to a hotel that allowed you to stay and sleep inside a piece of art.

Sixteen or so of its 40 rooms have been cre­ated by an inter­na­tional col­lec­tion of artists who have been given the freedom to push the bound­aries of what con­sti­tutes a hotel room to the very limit. We chose the Pasolini Room (also called the Prophet Room) by Dario Bellezza, Adele Camria and Antonio him­self. The black metal door is covered with Pier Paolo Pasolini’s poetry, can­ti­levered so we can knock it down should we want to, and opens into an impossibly narrow, pitch-dark cor­ridor which requires us to turn our wheelie suit­cases side­ways. The room is large and all walls and ceil­ings are plastered with straw and mud. It shouldn’t work, but it does! The effect is at first per­plexing, then strangely comforting.