The notion of the quintessential Italian summer didn’t just arrive, fully formed, like a scene from a film. Rather, it was cultivated over decades, shaped by taste, time, and the people who lived it. And no place did more to define that dream than Il Pellicano, the storied Tuscan hotel that came to define Mediterranean glamour. Set on a clifftop overlooking the limpid waters of the Mediterranean, whether or not you’ve visited, the view feels familiar. Fuchsia bougainvillaea climbs across the facades of terracotta red houses. Dense tufts of fragrant rosemary line the meandering walkways. And at the water’s edge, reached via a steep staircase carved into the rocks, lines of towel-draped sun beds peek out from yellow-striped umbrellas, their occupants gently glowing in the Italian summer sun.
Photo: Slim Aarons
“Il Pellicano has been known for the past 60 years because it has this ineffable, magical quality,” says the hotelier Marie-Louise Sciò, creative director of her family’s historic bolthole near Porto Ercole. She was speaking a few days after the raucous 60th anniversary party she threw for the coastal Tuscan resort, which saw guests like Margaret Qualley, Jenna Lyons and Haider Ackermann play out the kind of scenes—a languid candlelit dinner followed by a late poolside night disco—that have been fueling Il Pellicano’s allure for generations.
Scio, whose father Roberto purchased the hotel in 1975, took up the mantle of creative director in 2006. Over the past two decades, she has done her part in shaping the hotel’s reputation as a modern icon of cultivated leisure. While her parents were fixtures in Roman high society, Sciò’s circle belongs to Italy’s design and fashion vanguard. She studied architecture at the Rhode Island School of Design and worked in New York before joining the family business. Her friends are a who’s who of contemporary taste-makers.
“There are very few people in the world—let alone hoteliers—that have the ability to cultivate not just a family while away on holiday but truly a community of creatives,” said designer Harris Reed. “From 60 years ago until last weekend, the endorphin injection that Il Pellicano serves up is unmatched,” added the stylist and former British Vogue editor Elizabeth Saltzman, both of whom attended the 60th anniversary event.
