Why Il Pellicano, chic Italian hotel on the Tuscan coast, still draws the jet set
- Despite the property’s prestige, Marie-Louise Sciò’s understated makeover is more home than hotel
- Perched on the edge of the Tyrrhenian Sea, the property has long attracted a glamorous clientele, including Sophia Loren, Charlie Chaplin
Who knew there were pelicans in Italy? There aren’t – although there are pink flamingos in the lagoon you must cross, by causeway, to reach this celebrated hotel on the Italian coast, in Tuscany, about 90 minutes’ drive from Rome airport.
Presumably there’s a story behind that. Indeed. It was built on a promontory in Porto Ercole, in 1965, by Patricia and Michael Graham, who named it after the road they used to live on in California, Pelican Point.
They had planned to import some pelicans but instead it became the nesting place for both the yacht set and the jet set, who flocked here to enjoy its casual luxury and discreet hillside location. Charlie Chaplin, Sophia Loren, members of the Borghese family, the maharaja of Cooch Behar – they all came.
La Dolce Vita, eh? Very much so. It helped that one of its fans was American photographer Slim Aarons. His images of the hotel’s starry clientele lounging on yellow-and-white-striped towels defined Italian glamour overseas for decades. When the Grahams sold the place, in 1979, to Roberto Sciò, the party simply grew bigger.
What makes it so hot now? Sciò’s daughter, Marie-Louise. After she studied architecture at Rhode Island School of Design, her father asked her to revive the hotel’s fading plumage and bring it into the 21st century. She began with a bedroom and bathroom, in 2006.
Since then, she has redone the whole place, set up a hotel-design business and launched two other properties (La Posta Vecchia, once John Paul Getty’s home outside Rome, and Mezzatorre, on the island of Ischia). Il Pellicano, however, is the stellar flagship.