LIKE THE WILD Tuscan orchids that burst forth in shades of lemon and violet along the craggy coast of Italy’s Argentario promontory, Marie-Louise Sciò’s lifetime comes into full bloom in spring. It’s then that she prepares for the occupied summer season season at her family’s 3 inns, the Mezzatorre on the island of Ischia, La Posta Vecchia in Ladispoli and Il Pellicano, the legendary vacation resort cradled in the volcanic rocks higher than the seaside town of Porto Ercole. Considering that 2011, Sciò has been not only the embodiment of these properties’ glamorously Italian spirit but their imaginative director and C.E.O. Her father, Robert Sciò, bought Resort Il Pellicano in 1979 from Patricia Graham, an American heiress, and her British spouse, Michael, an ex-R.A.F. fighter pilot, who had designed it in the mid-60s as a private villa and club. Its languid, sun-bleached charm was immortalized by the photographer Slender Aarons. These days, it is the 44-12 months-previous Sciò who oversees its 47 rooms and two terrace restaurants. With an offhand way that belies a good deal of preparation, she seamlessly coordinates each aspect of Il Pellicano. “It’s all-consuming,” she suggests, “but in an amazing way.”
But when the frenzy of the summer season year dies down, she heads to Rome, the place she can recharge. Operate carries on, of course: In addition to organizing the upcoming year at Il Pellicano and Mezzatorre, and managing La Posta Vecchia, she has Issimo, her new life-style web-site that focuses on Italian-manufactured manner, food stuff and design. Nevertheless, she savors her time in Rome, absent from the seaside. “It’s wonderful to be ready to indulge in my private aspect,” she suggests.
SHE Bought THE DUPLEX apartment exactly where she life with her 18-12 months-previous son, Umberto, only just lately. In style it is a complete adjust from the flat she experienced rented for the preceding eight many years — a loftlike room in a 1950s building in Monteverde, just exterior of the chaotic Trastevere neighborhood. In a city of Renaissance edifices, the construction stood out for its brass-and-glass Modernist foyer and clean inside strains. Inside, she painted the apartment’s partitions and woodwork a celadon eco-friendly, offsetting the black-and-white checkerboard marble floors.
Then, a few of many years in the past, she observed herself craving to dwell nearer to the Tiber River and a far more central aspect of the town. Sciò, who properly trained in wonderful artwork and architecture at the Rhode Island Faculty of Style, desired to make a place of visible contradictions a house exactly where she could juxtapose ’70s furnishings and a Pop Art palette against the classical proportions of an historical developing.
Her new apartment is in an enclave dominated by the imposing circular Castel Sant’Angelo, erected as a mausoleum circa A.D. 130 by the emperor Hadrian. The 15th-century constructing retains a lot of of its original facts, which includes 13-foot painted coffered ceilings and elaborate parquet floors. But inside of her 3,700-square-foot house, Sciò has designed an irreverent, rock ’n’ roll-infused refuge, albeit a person punctuated with the perform of style icons, including Gio Ponti, as very well as antiques.
Alternatively of placing a coffee desk up coming to the gray De Padova couch in the residing location — too traditional — she organized modest, stool-like tables by the founder of the ’80s Memphis motion, Ettore Sottsass, atop a cylindrical Op Artwork Rotazioni plum-and-azure rug by the Spanish designer Patricia Urquiola for CC-Tapis. “You can sit on the stools or place your glass down, and you can go them close to,” Sciò claims. “I did not want everything static.” Nearby are a pair of very low black-and-white grid consoles by the 1960s Italian radical anti-architecture collective Superstudio — some of the few parts of household furniture the superior-concept group essentially manufactured Sciò stacks her art books on them. On the wall guiding a long wooden Rimadesio eating table ringed with Gio Ponti 969 chairs — his 1969 reinterpretation of a 1930s style — hold some of her very own paintings, as very well as a Robert Rauschenberg print and a 1950s photograph by Paolo Di Paolo of the artist Lucio Fontana and the actress Anna Magnani. In yet another corner, Louis XVI bergères upholstered in leopard-print velvet flank a crimson lacquer 1970s bar cupboard.
Sciò’s appreciate of new music, in actuality, informs significantly of her aesthetic. In addition to her other duties at the lodges, she applications their eclectic soundtracks (this past winter season, she went deep into ’70s Italian pop). Recently, holed up in the den downstairs — the apartment’s reduced stage is divided into a sequence of cozy bedrooms that line a hallway painted a smoky indigo — she produced a playlist of 5 songs every from just about every artist in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Many evenings, she puts on headphones and escapes there for several hours. “I can go from FKA Twigs to Justin Bieber to John Cage. I like music that is in a way architectural, that has house,” she states.
The pandemic has not soured her like for Rome without a doubt, the isolation has rekindled her relationship with the town. Considering that drop, she’s invested much of her time wandering via its narrow streets and dynamic ruins, now empty of crowds. “It’s been Rome back again to the Romans, which is the bright facet of a terrible time,” she says. “For after, you can satisfy your good friends outside the house for cocktails in the Piazza Navona, and you remember why it’s so fantastic to be alive.”