Dr. Roberto Sciò first stepped foot on the grounds of Hotel Il Pellicano, just off the Tuscan coast, because he had no desire to sleep aboard a schooner anchored by his dear friend Bill Krueger. “I said, ‘Bill,’” Sciò tells me with the assurance of a story often repeated, “‘I prefer to sleep on the ground.’”
Krueger, it’s said, told Sciò to drive about 30 minutes from Porto Santo Stefano, where his boat was anchored, to the hotel. “There was no sign — nothing,” Sciò recalls. “It looked like a normal house.” He got out of his car and saw a man standing under the archway at the building’s entrance. “But I can't believe it to my eyes,” he says. “Because Charlie Chaplin was under the arch. That was the first person I met going to Pellicano.”
Sciò was lucky to get a room. In those days, the owners only allowed four to be occupied by Italians; they mostly preferred to spend time with their British and American friends. It was a Friday, which meant there was a gala on at Il Pellicano with dinner and music and dancing. Later that evening, Sciò found himself seated at the terrace bar near Chaplin and Chaplin’s daughter, Geraldine. Geraldine left to use the bathroom, and Chaplin called Sciò over. “I said, ‘Mr. Chaplin, what can I do for you?’” Sciò recalls. “Please, when my daughter comes back, please, can you dance with her? But don't tell her that I asked you.’” Of course, he did, and Geraldine turned him down at first. But with some fatherly encouragement, she changed her mind. “I did dance with poor Geraldine,” Sciò says, “when she had no intention to dance with me.”
That night would turn Sciò into an accidental hotelier. In 1979, he bought the main hotel building from its first owners, Patricia and Michael Graham, an interior designer and a former RAF pilot, respectively. The couple had financed the hotel in part by building and selling houses on the property to the likes of Chaplin (Cottage D), oil tycoon George Coleman, and photographer John Swope, whose pictures of this early period still line the walls of the bar. Each owner also became a shareholder. (Later, Sciò bought Chaplin’s home — the “cottage” he’d wanted to own as soon as he saw it — followed slowly but surely by every other house on the lot, the last of which was sold to him in 2020.)
Part of what drew Sciò, now 89, to Il Pellicano was the sheer romance of the place. His arrival would have taken him past what was then a grass tennis court tucked beneath the Monte Argentario peaks, through the low, wide archway covered in ivy, set against a Le Corbusier-red stucco and creamy stonework. He would’ve walked through to the main house, where two sitting rooms sit opposite a wood-burning fireplace adorned with the iron Pellicano logo. Through the doors would’ve come the chatter of guests enjoying aperitivo on the terrace or seated at the adjoining restaurant overlooking the turquoise swimming pool and the island-dotted sea. He would have seen everything sloping gracefully downward, from the mountains to the water.
Roberto was also compelled by the atmosphere. “There’s an energy to the place that makes you stand a little taller,” says WM Brown founder Matt Hranek. “It wasn’t designed as a hotel; it was designed as a place where friends would gather.” In the hotel’s public spaces, conversations converge, and every seat seems to offer intimacy. Camille Miceli, the creative director of Pucci, has been going there since she was a child. “The place is like a myth,” she says. “It’s a place where time has stopped.”
Il Pellicano — or “the Pelli,” as loyalists call it — is turning 60 in June and launching a collection with Highsnobiety to mark the occasion. Until an Aermont Capital investment in 2023, it had only ever had two family owners and two head bartenders. The Sciòs added custom Gio Ponti chairs between the fire and the bar, where legendary bartender Federico Morosi holds court and where guests often sit to play backgammon. Rosemary bushes line the pathways, and beyond the pool there’s now an elevator to help staff navigate what would be 94 stairs and to ferry guests down to the much-photographed sbarcatello (concrete beach).
The famous entryway arch remains the same. These days, it’s often kept company by a ‘60s Fiat 500 or an ‘80s Rolls Royce, the latter likely belonging to legendary stylist and former L’Uomo Vogue editor Robert Rabensteiner. When Rabensteiner visited in the summer of 2023, it was with Haider Ackermann; he picked the designer up from the airport in Rome, and the two drove in together. “You go over the bridge on the water, then you come through the forest and arrive next to the sea,” Rabensteiner narrates. “The car is quite heavy so you have to drive quite slowly. People are stopping and looking in, not only for the car, but to see who is sitting inside.”
“You have to learn to feel that you're a lucky man when you go to special places. It is this fantastic gift that I am allowed to go,” Rabensteiner says of Il Pellicano. “It’s a gift from God.”
He, like other patrons, attributes the hotel’s magic to the attentive touch of Marie-Louise Sciò, Roberto’s daughter, his “pride,” and the current CEO and Creative Director of Pellicano Hotels group. Her entry into the industry wasn’t frictionless. “Hospitality is very male-centric,” she says. “And I was very insecure at first because I was the daughter of the owner. But also, I’m very open to learning; I have no shame. I am always observing.” These days she’s up before any of the guests, enjoying the Monte Argentario sunrise with balletic posture and sporting a ponytail atop smart resort wear. She believes the hotel is the one to choose its guests. “It’s always had a very strong sense of calling you,” she says. “It’s a very self-selective place. It’s not for everyone.”
Marie-Louise spent much of her childhood looking out from the bushes at this self-selecting set, traipsing around alongside photographer Slim Aarons, perhaps the hotel’s most famous chronicler, who sometimes asked her to swim laps in the hotel pool to complete a scene. She remembers seeing him stage one photo in particular: a portrait of her parents, Roberto Sciò and Marie-Louise Brulatour Mills, lounging on a garden settee draped in Valentino fabric. “Mom is in a white nightgown, yet she has this fabulous Bulgari necklace on, and she’s reading The Rise and Fall of the Medici. Everything is so fabulous without screaming and yelling — just naturally.” A good way, she adds, to describe Il Pellicano.
More than a few people seem to believe that Aarons’ maxim of photographing attractive people in attractive places doing attractive things came at least in part from Il Pellicano. “I used to call him Slimbo,” Roberto Sciò says. “Slimbo used to say, ‘You want to know how the Italian women fall to my feet? You know they adore me. Because I have a special word, and when I pronounce it they can’t resist. Stuzzicadenti.’ It’s the wood you put in your teeth to clean them — a toothpick. I said, ‘Slim, are you crazy? Are you feeling well?’ He said, ‘I tell them, ‘stuzzicadenti.’”
Rabensteiner feels the photographer’s work still informs how guests dress — a ghostly presence who might snap a photo at any moment. It’s part of the reason the experience of the hotel is so tightly intertwined with the worlds of fashion and style. “You don’t go with a small trolley to Pellicano even if you stay just for a weekend,” Rabensteiner says. “You bring quite a lot of stuff. I would never wear red trousers and a white shirt, but at the Pellicano, I do.”
In 2009, Margherita Missoni, who has a drink on the bar menu named the ‘Angurita’ for her, helped curate the guest list for a party thrown by Marie-Louise. Juergen Teller photographed that event; his pictures were turned into a book alongside work from Aarons and Swope. “The thing about it that I always tell people is that it was real,” Missoni says. “It was not like an Instagram photo op where we pretended to have fun. That’s really what Marie-Louise excels at: the combination of people. There’s always a connection, a thing that makes it organic.”
Also part of the firmament is Federico Morosi, the hotel’s storied head bartender. (He has hospitality in his genes; his great-grandfather was a maître d’ in France in the 1930s, and they both worked at the Gstaad Palace Hotel, family run since 1947.) He changes from daytime pool attire to more formal suiting at night and is one of those purveyors of luxury who’s so charming that you forget he’s also seamlessly seeing to your every wish. Leonardo Pucci, the head of leather goods and shoes at Dior Men’s, says that the first time he visited Il Pellicano, he ordered a classic martini to “challenge” the bar. “It was really perfect,” he says. “That memory stays with me.”
Morosi likewise allows himself to be charmed by his guests. He describes how journalist Eugenio Scalfari, the founder of La Repubblica, spent several weeks in August at the hotel every year. “It was a rich chance to talk with this man,” Morosi says. “We spoke about everything: about life, about psychology, about the Pope.”
“When you die and hopefully go to heaven, the guy behind the bar is Italian,” says Hranek, the WM Brown editor. Morosi “is an iconic standard of the Italian bartender.” Yolanda Edwards, Hranek’s wife and the founder of YOLO Journal, says Morosi creates a sense of belonging for the hotel’s guests. “It’s the feeling of recognition — Federico lighting up when he sees you,” she says. “Don’t join a club for $15,000 a year. Spend your money going to the Pellicano.”
I’ve heard whispers from competitors that Marie-Louise Sciò might be the greatest living hotelier in Europe. So perhaps it’s understandable that a nervousness creeps into her voice at the idea that she won’t always be around to shepherd her life’s work. “When I would leave at the end of a season where I’d really give 180%, I was always physically sick,” she says. “It’s exhausting. Now, I try to pace myself.”
The question of Hotel Il Pellicano’s future is not an idle one. In 2023, the UK-based Aermont Capital invested an initial €200 million in Pellicano Hotel Group while retaining Marie-Louise as CEO. She offhandedly mentions plans for a 70th anniversary party, and some people I spoke to see it as a positive sign that the 60th anniversary celebration will take place. “I see the Pellicano continuing to influence the world of hospitality and continuing to evolve and continuing to keep itself relevant but independent and free.” She pauses, as though surprised at herself, before adding, “I talk about it as if it’s a person.”
On its 60th birthday, guests will again be dancing at Pellicano wearing, according to Pucci creative director Miceli, “something very vaporous.” Whereas the 50th anniversary festivities included an arrival carpet of Missoni fabric, Marie-Louise describes this party as ‘60s style, with disco balls under a moon creeping toward full. A neon-lit “60” will be added to the iconic “Hotel Il Pellicano” sign above the arch where Sciò first met Chaplin all those years ago.
I ask Sciò if he still feels Chaplin’s presence at the hotel. His buoyant voice begins to crack. “I tell you, a miracle happened to my mind recently,” he says. “While walking through the hotel I see standing in front of me Chaplin saying, ‘Please, ask Geraldine to dance.’”
Morosi, too, sometimes communes with the hotel’s ghosts. “On certain days in June, when I see a special light of the sun and the blue of the pool,” he says, “I think: Maybe Slim Aarons on this day of the year took that picture.”
