Marie-Louise Sció on Her Life in Parties & 60 Years of Hotel Il Pellicano Glamour

Slim Aarons famously said he photographed “attractive people doing attractive things in attractive places.” It’s no surprise, then, that he was drawn to Hotel Il Pellicano, on the Tuscan coast of Italy, and captured its romantic charm and glamorous guests. Il Pellicano has been a part of Marie-Louise Sciò’s family since 1979, when her father acquired it from Michael Graham, a British aviator, and his wife, the socialite Patsy Daszel; the couple had turned the property from their private villa into an intimate hotel in 1965. Today Sciò serves as the CEO and creative director of -Pellicano Hotels Group, which includes two other storied Italian destinations: La Posta Vecchia Hotel, near Rome, and Mezzatorre, in Ischia. The hotels have welcomed a long list of notable visitors, from Henry Fonda and Sophia Loren to Jackie Kennedy, but “we never spill the beans on guests,” says Sciò. After she graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design, her father, Roberto, tasked her with updating one of Il Pellicano’s bathrooms. The project led to Sciò spearheading a redesign of the hotel. “All our properties have that feeling of being real,” says Sciò. “There’s a dialogue between the past, the present, and the future.” This summer, she’s hosting a thumping celebration to mark Il Pellicano’s 60th anniversary.

Roberto Sciò first visited Il Pellicano in the 1960s as a guest of Michael Graham and Patsy Daszel’s. There, he met Charlie Chaplin. “Chaplin said to my dad, ‘Will you dance with my daughter?’ ” recalls Sciò. Above: For the hotel’s 50th anniversary, in 2015, Sciò (center) paid homage to that hedonistic legacy with a bash that lasted an entire weekend.

Sciò (in her father’s arms) poses with her grandparents, parents, and siblings. “Parties have been a thing in our household forever,” she says. She attributes her entertaining skills to her mother, also named Marie-Louise, who was a fashion editor at Harper’s Bazaar Spain in the 1970s and became Slim Aarons’s muse. On Fridays, Sciò’s mother hosted “gala nights at Il Pellicano,” with “a live band and everything.”

Sciò sunbathes on her father’s back at La Posta Vecchia. The property had been a Renaissance palazzo owned by the Orsini family before it was purchased and restored by John Paul Getty in the 1960s; Roberto acquired it from Getty’s heirs in the early 1980s. Initially, it was the Sciòs’ country home. Growing up an hour away in Rome, “we used to go on weekends,” says Sciò, who recalls having all of her childhood birthday parties there. In 1990, Roberto turned it into a hotel.

Aarons, a regular at Il Pellicano, took the photo above in 1973. Later on, for his stays, he “used to pay my father in cameras,” says Sciò. “I asked my dad recently, ‘Where are the cameras?’ ” Turns out he threw them all out. Now the hotel hosts the photographer Juergen Teller, whom Sciò invited to capture the property. His images were featured in Hotel Il Pellicano, a book published in 2011. “Juergen is the only photographer I really wanted to work with. I liked his way of working, which is completely no bullshit. It’s very raw.”

Sciò’s parents, Roberto and Marie-Louise, are pictured lounging at Il Pellicano in 1980. The photo, taken by Aarons, was staged by Charlie Chaplin’s former cottage, on a couch the couple pushed outside. “They took this spare bit of Valentino fabric and threw it on top,” says Sciò. “I literally sat behind Slim just looking at this photo shoot, and I thought, Oh my god, they’re so divine.”

“Growing up visiting Il Pellicano was quite interesting, because it was like looking at a film set,” says Sciò. At the hotel’s lavish gatherings, “kids weren’t allowed, so we had to hide behind the rosemary bushes and peek. We were never actively part of it; we were always spectators.” Above: A 1967 photo of Il Pellicano taken by Aarons.

Sciò (far right) is pictured at age 14 with her older brother, Harry Charles, and older sister, Yvonne. “I used to be a terrible teenager, so misbehaved,” says Sciò. So much so that she was enrolled in Aiglon College, a Swiss boarding school. “I used to go to all sorts of nightclubs because I love music, and I love electronic music. It was the ’90s, so it was full-on rave culture.”

To throw a memorable bash, “you need good music. You need a DJ who isn’t arrogant. A lot of times, you go to parties and they have all these big-name DJs, but their ego is so big that they don’t care if someone’s dancing or not.” Right: Sciò (second from left) poses with (from left) Bianca Brandolini d’Adda; her sister, Yvonne; Margherita Maccapani Missoni; and Delfina Delettrez Fendi at a party at Il Pellicano in 2010.

In 2019, Sciò partnered with Matches Fashion to host a pop-up aboard a 1930s-era boat, which sailed to her three properties carrying a curated vacation edit. “At every hotel, there was something happening—a trunk show, big dinners,” she says. The “Italian Grand Tour” concluded with a celebration at Mezzatorre, pictured above. Sciò (back row, center) is lounging with her longtime friends (clockwise from top left) Miriam Leone, Igor Ramírez García-Peralta, Anna Singh, Lucinda Agar, Claudia Donaldson, Elisa Simonelli, and Andrea Valerio.

Sciò with her friends Eugenie Niarchos (left) and Margherita Maccapani Missoni (center) at a party she threw for the opening of Mezzatorre, in 2019. “A good guest is someone who wants to have fun, who participates, who meets new people, who goes out of their comfort zone. I have a few staple friends who always come, and then I mix it up.”

In 2021, Issimo—Il Pellicano’s luxury retail extension—created an Italian road-trip edition of Monopoly. Above: Sciò relishes the board game with her close friend Giorgio Guidotti, the head of PR and communications at MaxMara.

“Haider is the best dancer on the planet Earth,” says Sciò of Haider Ackermann, the recently appointed creative director of Tom Ford, with whom she’s pictured above. This party followed a long, exhausting week of work. “I walked down to the pool, I sat, and when you’re so tired, you just cry. It was a release. Haider came down, and we just started dancing. Then everyone came, and we had a great party. Then I slept for two weeks.”