In the winter of 2018, Marie-Louise Sciò looked over her bucket list and decided to get to work. Item number one: collaborate with Birkenstock on an ‘elevated’ rendition of the German sandal. Item number two: launch a pop-up shop. On a boat. Floating in the middle of the Tyrrhenian Sea. Item number three: open one of the most acclaimed hotels of the decade. Within four months, she had succeeded on all fronts.
This should give you some idea about exactly who Marie-Louise Sciò is. If you look beyond the warm smile, and the old The Rolling Stones T-shirt she wears to our interview (admittedly beneath a much-loved orange Gabriela Hearst jumper), this is an individual who makes magic happen.
Although you may not know her name, you will almost certainly be familiar with her brand of sorcery. If you’ve ever wondered why stripey towels felt like the must-have accessory of last summer, or why Ischia suddenly seemed like the hottest place to be, then you can thank this 44-year-old Italian.
On paper, she is a hotelier, overseeing the Pellicano Group of hotels, which include Il Pellicano in Porto Ercole, La Posta Vecchia in Ladispoli and The Mezzatorre in Ischia. They are boutique hotels in the truest sense of the phrase: small, detail-orientated and luxurious without any flashiness. They are hotels where the world’s great and good go to escape life.
But to say she is just a hotelier is to misunderstand her truest talent. Instead, she is one of the world’s great tastemakers: someone who has the ability to start trends, help guide the cultural gaze in new, exciting directions and make you want – nay, need – everything she touches.
As for that bucket list, Il Pellicano was one of the first companies to collaborate with Birkenstock, and certainly the only hotel brand to do such a thing, creating a pair of beautiful raffia sandals that sold out instantly (I’ve lost count of fashion editors who lament not placing their order at the time). Her pop-up shop was a 1930s yacht in conjunction with Matchesfashion that sailed for over three weeks between the hotels in Tuscany, Rome and Ischia. And The Mezzatorre was one of the most dazzling hotel openings of the last 10 years.
I first heard about the Pellicano Group through the Birkenstock connection and it struck me as odd that a hotel was in the business of making beautiful shoes. Then, I thought no more about it. Some time later, fashion stylists, editors and designers I knew started to whisper about corners of Italy I had hitherto never heard of. Finally, the Instagram feeds of creatives whose style I admire started to fill with alluring images of poolside scenes – each one of them, upon investigation, revealing themselves to be a Pellicano hotel. A year later, I checked in to see what all the fuss was about.
It is a true art form to sell a lifestyle, and Sciò is very good at it. She doesn’t have to take out a single advert to fill her hotels; instead, she ensures they are talked about in the right circles, posted on the most aspirational social feeds, and remembered by the most discerning of guests.
‘My mum and dad both had great taste,’ she tells me over a glass of white wine in London’s Charlotte Street Hotel. ‘My mother was very charismatic. If there was an eclipse and you could only see it in Mexico, she would throw a party there. She suffered a lot with her eyes, but that wouldn’t stop the party. Instead, she would wear an eye patch and make it part of her outfit.’
This is how it is with her. You’ll be sat listening to her sing-songy voice, carried along by the lilt, until she drops into conversation an anecdote or story that is too fabulous not to make you stop in your tracks. (Another one: ‘I once came home one day to find my mother in a black leotard doing Tai Chi with Pavarotti in the living room.’)
Her father is the renowned businessman Roberto Sciò, who fell in love with the Il Pellicano hotel after courting Sciò’s flame-haired mother. ‘He was living in Italy; my mum was American,’ she says. ‘So he started taking her to the only place he knew where they spoke English, which was Il Pellicano, because it was founded by an American and English couple. They went weekend after weekend. When the owners decided to sell, my dad bought it to protect it in some way. Then he sort of left it.
Il Pellicano had always attracted a beautiful crowd: models, movie producers, as well as some of Hollywood’s biggest stars, including Charlie Chaplin. The family would spend summers at the hotel, where Sciò remembers watching scenes of unadulterated glamour from the wings. ‘It was very much a grown-up’s world, so I saw the whole thing from behind a rosemary bush. I was sneaking out in my pyjamas at night. On Friday evenings, there would be a gala around the pool, with candles everywhere and a band.’
By the early 2000s, Sciò had graduated from The Rhode Island School of Design, where she studied architecture, and did a stint working in real estate and interior design. When her father asked her to try her hand at redoing one of the rooms at Il Pellicano, she reluctantly agreed. ‘I did a bathroom, then, I suggested the whole place needed some freshening up.’ He asked her to take on the job. She said no. Instead, she agreed to help find a designer who could work on the project.
‘I interviewed many interior designers, but all of them were going to introduce their style and it was going to be all about them and not about the hotel. So I thought, I’m probably going to screw it up, but I’ll do it. I suppose I did it for the same reason my father bought the hotel. I knew the essence of the place, and I knew I wanted to protect it.’
Sciò also knew Slim Aarons, the lauded US photographer who chronicled the immaculate lives of the jet set in the late 20th century. She remembers him staying in Il Pellicano when she was a child, snapping away from the sidelines.
‘I was a little girl, around eight years old, and I remember him running around and having dinner with my father and he used to pay my dad in cameras. He came every year because it was the place in the 1980s. So, I got his number from my dad and I called him and told him I needed to remember what it was like. He told me he had sold his archive to Getty. So, I went to London and I found boxes and boxes of his images of Il Pellicano.’
Staying true to a place’s soul is what Sciò does best. At Il Pellicano, she did it by managing to keep the older, loyal clientele happy, while bringing in a new crowd. And she has done the same at another property, La Posta, Vecchia – Jean Paul Getty’s old palazzo, which is a 30-minute drive from Rome. Most recently, she has turned her hand to The Mezzatorre, a gem of a hotel on the Ischian coastline.
‘I wanted people to feel like we had blown the dust off something that already existed,’ she says of her approach to The Mezzatorre, which required four months of ‘heavy make-up’ before its relaunch in 2019. (Last summer, it hosted a Max Mara Cruise show across the entire hotel.)
So, what has she done exactly? It’s hard to put your finger on it. The interiors are beautiful, no doubt, but not excessively so. There is an honesty to the rooms, a simplicity that might even disappoint a crowd used to the five-star glitz in Capri – and that’s just how she likes it.
‘If you think about it, Posta Vecchia, Mezzatorre, Pellicano, they’re not in Rome or Capri. They’re in secondary destinations, or at least they were. I like things that are not obvious. So when we opened in Ischia, everyone was like, “Why are you opening there?” And instead, I thought: Why would I open in Capri?’
Detail is her thing. Despite being the creative director and CEO of the hotel group, she still does the playlists for each destination herself. She spent close to two hours figuring out how wide the gold stripe should be on the paper cups that guests use to drink their rosemary-infused water. She chose the now-famous pink parasols in Mezzatorre because they match the exact colour of the Ischian sunset, so that when you look out to sea they disappear into the distance.
‘I’m in the business of making people feel something,’ she says. ‘In some way, I want people to come away feeling enriched. That they have experienced a bit of magic but also love. I want people to smile at something; maybe it’s a book they’ve always wanted to read and they finally found it in a bookcase in our hotels. I curate the books. So, I asked a friend of mine who is a very good writer, “What are the 50 books that everyone wants to read but don’t have the time?” I have DVDs, too. Who has them anymore?! I’m never going to take them out because you can’t find really good films on streaming services. We have everything, from the silent film Sunrise: The Story of Two Humans, to Lars Von Trier’s Dogville. I want to create lots of little vibrations. We, as hoteliers, have the responsibility of people’s time and that’s really precious. How you fill that time is important.’
Fashion designer JJ Martin has known Sciò for over a decade. The two met at a dinner in Milan, when JJ, herself a respected tastemaker in the world of fashion, was struck by the other woman’s warmth and energy. ‘I think everybody feels it,’ JJ says. ‘I adore the unique spaces she creates and the chic parties she throws. But mainly, it is just her presence. She’s a rocket – always on the search for excellence, but above all, beauty and joy. It’s the full Italian package but wrapped up in her American no-nonsense, let’s-get-it-done attitude. She’s very unique in that way.’
Over lockdown, and with the hotels shut, Sciò went about bringing her own brand of Italian joy and good taste to the masses with her lifestyle website, ISSIMO. On the site, you can find Pellicano’s towels and ashtrays (which have a knack of going missing from guests’ bedrooms) but also hundreds of other Italian-made accessories.
‘ISSIMO is a search for quality. I wanted to do something that was an extension of the hotel; a sort of container of everything I’m curious about. We are about to sell an olive oil called “Nuovo”, which is the first two weeks when oil comes to press. It has a completely different colour and taste. It’s a real luxury.’
As we get ready to leave the bar, I ask her one final question: ‘What makes great taste?’ She stops.
‘Hmmm…’ There’s a long pause before she finally answers. ‘It’s an elegance of the soul, I think,’ she says. ‘It’s a softness, a gentleness. It’s about being curious.’
And with that, she heads out into the London night, still thinking of ways to make the world more beautiful.
This article appeared in the March 2022 issue of ELLE UK.
