Set-Jetting / The Odyssey
Following The Odyssey to the Mediterranean
Christopher Nolan shot his adaptation of Homer across Rome, Malta and Morocco, and three properties turn those coordinates into somewhere worth staying.
Set-jetting usually rewards the screenshot over the place. The Odyssey, the oldest story of the long way home, asks for something slower. Nolan filmed it, in cinemas since 17 July, along coastlines that read like a map of the classical imagination.
Rome
rhinoceros roma, steps from the ancient centre
Christopher Nolan's film is Greek at heart, yet part of it was shot on Italian sand, along the Roman coastline at Ostia. Rome needs no cinematic excuse. It simply gives a reason to look again, and a place worth looking from.
The residence
An art house behind a Roman shell
rhinoceros roma was founded by Alda Fendi and designed by Jean Nouvel: six floors, twenty-five apartments, a working gallery. Nouvel left the ancient bones exposed and set steel and raw plaster against them.
The art rotates through the lower floors and the light moves across the old surfaces through the day. You do not tour the city from here so much as wake up inside it, a short walk from the Colosseum.
The gallery is the point as much as the rooms, an argument that a place to sleep can also be a place that thinks.
Malta
The Xara Palace and Calypso's island
Malta's claim on the story runs deeper than any call sheet. The archipelago has long been Ogygia, the island where Calypso kept Odysseus from his voyage home, and the production used its water tanks at Kalkara. Homer called this the navel of the sea.
Mdina
Inside the silent city
The Xara Palace is a 17th-century palazzo folded into the walls of Mdina, the medieval capital. Seventeen rooms, antique furnishings, original art, all resting on bastions that fall away to the plain below.
The rooms
Individually drawn
No two rooms repeat. One wears mauve walls and a gilded mirror, another opens onto the ramparts. The building was restored with the patience of somewhere that expects to outlast its guests.
The bastions
Evening on the walls
Perched on centuries-old defences, the terraces hand the island back at dusk. For something quieter still, Palazzino Belvedere sits nearby, a townhouse restored for privacy rather than display.
The table
de Mondion
The Michelin-starred restaurant works the island's produce a few steps from the guest rooms. Dinner here is a destination, not an amenity, and the roof holds the view long after the plates are cleared.
Marrakech
La Sultana and The Odyssey's Morocco
Morocco did the heavy lifting for Christopher Nolan's Troy, from the kasbah of Ait Benhaddou to the wall of Essaouira, with Marrakech among the locations. The Red City is where most travellers begin, and where La Sultana Marrakech rewards the ones who stay.
Five riads
A floor plan learned by wandering
Five riads join behind one wall inside the medina, giving the hotel twenty-eight rooms and corridors that reward getting lost. The craft is everywhere: carved cedar, painted plaster, zellige set by the piece.
The roof
Over the medina
One of the largest rooftop terraces in the old city opens across the medina to the Atlas Mountains. It is the kind of view that resets the day, best taken slowly as the heat lifts toward evening.
The detail
Worked by hand
Look up and the ceilings are painted; look down and the floors are laid in pattern. La Sultana is a house of surfaces, each one made rather than bought, and it rewards the guest who slows down enough to notice.
Below the roof sit a spa and a hammam worked in the old manner, and two places to eat once the sun drops.
Returning at the end of a day, through the courtyards and the lantern light, feels less like checking in than disappearing into the city for a while.
For Boujeez
The pull here is less the film than the timing. Summer is when the Gulf travels, and these are the kinds of addresses that reward it: private, layered, built for slow mornings and long dinners. Homer's hero took ten years to get home. This summer's odyssey, you can book, and still be back by autumn.
The details, as quoted by the properties. rhinoceros roma, Rome, from EUR 475 per apartment per night: rhinocerosroma.com. The Xara Palace, Mdina, from GBP 201 per night: xarapalace.com.mt. Palazzino Belvedere, from GBP 2,136 per night: xarapalace.com.mt/palazzino-belvedere. La Sultana Marrakech, from GBP 568 for a Riad Room: lasultanahotels.com.