JOHN SIMPSON

It's as close to perfection as I am likely to get. Below lies the sea, a brilliant, all-embracing blue, with the tracks of boats and the paths of currents marking its still surface. A mile away in that misty blue are the islands where the Sirens sang to Ulysses, and would have wrecked him and his ship if he hadn't ordered his oarsmen to plug their ears with wax. Opposite is a steep spur of rock leading down half a mile to the sea, with dozens of houses in lines on it, pastel-painted. At any time of the day or night, looking across at them is like being on stage and watching the doings of the audience.

My wife Dee and I are lounging on our balcony, gazing out at it all. Breakfast is spread on the table. This may be the land that makes the world's best coffee, but I've ordered Darjeeling tea for breakfast. It is precisely as it should be: good leaves and scalding water. From inside our cool room, music is playing quietly. Sometimes, when I am somewhere uncomfortable - Iraq in a temperature of 120°, perhaps, or some barren part of Afghanistan watching out for an ambush - I allow myself to think about being here, and things feel better at once. Just knowing that near-perfection exists somewhere on earth makes the difficult times easier to bear.

As it happens, Dee and I were in Kabul some years ago when she discovered the hotel on the web. In Kabul, too, it was boiling hot, with the fierce yellow dust, thin and insistent, that gets in everywhere during the Afghan summer. We were sitting in a small hotel, waiting for the moment when it would be reasonable to go and get a gin and tonic. 'Think of somewhere really nice for us to go,' I said, and she came up with the answer instantly. 'Why don't I see if there's somewhere in... how about Positano?' Positano being one of the many places I'd heard of but never been to, I shrugged.

She found the hotel immediately. 'Le Sirenuse. I like it already.' I wandered over and looked at the pictures. The view was exactly the one I am looking at now from our balcony: church dome, a hillside of houses, the sea, the Sirens. On the strength of it, I nodded. We booked a room for a few weeks ahead, and went back to arranging what we were going to film in Afghanistan.

When we finally got to Positano, the pictures didn't do anything like justice to the charming palazzo we found ourselves in: the gorgeous 18th-century paintings and furniture clearly hand-picked by someone of great discerning taste, the way the place was built down the steep cliff so that you could never quite remember which floor anything was on, with the lobby right at the top of it all, the sense that everything has been done as taste required, regardless of the cost. The staff are virtually all local people. Each of them and their families known personally to the hotel owners, and they stay there year after year.

The majority of the guests are Italian. Sometimes you come across someone whose face looks familiar: then you remember how famous they are. On our first night, we dined in the restaurant, and a well-known couple came and sat down in front of us in that rather marked way film stars often have. They looked out at the glorious view, and bickered the entire time.

Over the years since that first visit, Franco Sersale and his son Antonio, the owners, have become good friends of ours. We met them first one evening, when they invited us to have a drink in one of the delightful little drawing-rooms. 'It's more like a stately home than a hotel,' I said, with more prescience than I usually show. Franco explained that it had indeed been their family home by the sea; the Sersales were a noble family from Naples, of Norman origin (the 'Ser' of their name is an antique form of our 'sir'). But over the years so many friends and relations invited themselves to stay there, that in 1951 Franco and his family decided to turn it into a hotel.

Franco is British-educated, and so is his son Antonio. Nowadays Antonio and his wife Carla are in charge of the business, while Franco travels the world. In his younger years, he gained a doctorate in engineering, but now he concentrates on photography. His pictures are justly famous, exhibited in New York and published in books. I have come to consider him a kind of Ulysses, tough-minded and resourceful, and even at 80, one of the world's great travellers. He is always back from somewhere, and planning a trip to somewhere else. This time when I saw him, he had just driven for days on end across Turkey, sometimes alone and sometimes with a friend. We hatched a plan to travel together to Afghanistan next spring.

Last night as we sat in the restaurant, the two musicians who have been playing there for years serenaded us with risquÉ Neapolitan ditties that only Franco, Antonio, Carla and the waiters could understand. After that, a Russian composer sang Italian songs, which he has translated into Russian. It was one of those evenings that you wish could last forever. The last streaks of scarlet and amethyst faded in the darkened sky, the other guests went to bed towards midnight, and the waiters gathered round to listen. Outside the windows, the wonderful sea with its Sirens lapped and shone under the full moon. Franco Sersale sat watching us all, listening and flashing a rare deep smile of someone who knows how to enjoy the best moments, and occasionally telling one of his quiet, incomparable anecdotes. As I say, it's as close to perfection as I'm likely to get.

John Simpson is the BBC's world affairs editor and can be seen around the globe on the BBC World news channel. BBC World is available in 200 countries and territories worldwide and on selected flights. John Simpson's Not Quite World's End: A Traveller's Tales (£20, Macmillan) is out now.