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.
“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.
Sciò’s childhood memories of the hotel sound strikingly similar to her parents’ days. “Friday nights were gala nights at Il Pellicano,” she remembers of the parties her parents hosted for the likes of Emilio Pucci, Maria Fendi, and Elsa Peretti. “You had to dress up. Women in long dresses, men in seersucker suits. There was a table stretching the entire terrace, with all the food suspended in aspic. It was the ’80s—there were candles floating in the pool.” Though the dress has evolved over the decades, little else has changed at the Pellicano in the past 60 years.
Long before the Sciòs took over, Il Pellicano already had a reputation for style. In her book, A Tuscan Home Away From Home, fashion historian Bronwyn Cosgrave recounts how Il Pellicano’s founders, former RAF fighter pilot Michael Graham and American industrial heiress Patricia Judson, came upon a wild, windswept plot of land on the Monte Argentario peninsula once owned by the noble Borghese family.
It was already a well-kept secret among European royals and discreet American socialites. The Dutch royal family summered just down the coast. Jackie Kennedy famously spent time here in the months following her husband’s assassination, igniting public fascination with this unspoiled sliver of Italian coastline.
Wanting to recreate a sense of understated, off-the-radar glamour, the Grahams modeled Il Pellicano’s dispersed layout on California celebrity haunt San Ysidro Ranch, but built in the style of a Tuscan farmhouse. Much of Il Pellicano’s architecture remains unchanged to this day: thick whitewashed plaster walls, broad arched doorways, and cool terracotta tile floors underfoot.
Those early years were immortalized by Magnum photographer John Swope, a close friend of the Grahams. In his grainy black-and-white shots, white-jacketed barmen mix cocktails behind a lacquered wood bar; sailboats bob in a placid harbor; and Patricia, a printed silk scarf knotted around her hair, cuts across the waves in a speedboat, an American flag behind her snapping in the wind. The images are intimate and cinematic, suffused with the easy, unstudied elegance the Grahams sought to cultivate. Their vision paid off. Guests like Charlie Chaplin, Sophia Loren, Monica Vitti, and Bing Crosby soon found their way through the gates.
When Roberto Sciò purchased Il Pellicano from the Grahams in 1975, he did little to change the aesthetic. What he did do, instead, was introduce the summer retreat to his own cohort of Roman socialites. It was this rarefied circle that American photographer Slim Aarons—the former war correspondent turned chronicler of high society—captured in his reporting on the European leisure class, much of it centered around Il Pellicano. The sunlit images cemented the mythos of Il Pellicano in the global imagination. Bronzed bodies lay out on the poolside flagstones. Sunbeds crowded along the water’s edge, spied, voyeuristically, from a clifftop perch.
Those photos, alongside similar sets captured in Capri and the South of France, became the blueprint for aspirational Mediterranean leisure. More than simply portraits, they were representative of a fantasy lifestyle—the origin story of the sprezzatura economy. (Sciò later commissioned Juergen Teller to reinterpret its mythology in the same way Swope and Aarons had done for the hotel’s previous generations.) But how has Il Pellicano been able to make such ephemeral moments of sunlit ease endure? “When you come in the door, time stops and you write your own story,” says Sciò.
It’s precisely this tension—a measured mix of time-worn tradition and contemporary style—that has shepherded Il Pellicano into the imagination of a new generation. “[Il Pellicano] remains true to its spirit, away from interpretation or duplicity,” says jewelry designer Francesca Amfitheatrof, who designed a dedicated collection to mark the 60th anniversary. “The fact that there have been only two head barmen over the decades says it all.”
On any given weekend during the long and languid Italian summer, Il Pellicano still hums with a particular kind of magic. Tanned guests linger over spritzes as the sun slips into the sea, the scent of rosemary and salt hanging in the air. It’s a tableau that feels suspended in time, yet very much alive. And while fashions may shift and generations change, Il Pellicano remains what it has always been: not just a hotel, but a stage on which the dream of summer is played out, again and again.