Le Sirenuse

Le Sirenuse

A two-hour drive south of Naples Capodichino, or an hour and a quarter by ferry from Molo Beverello in summer, Positano rises off the Tyrrhenian Sea toward the maiolica dome of Santa Maria Assunta, and at the top of the Via Cristoforo Colombo, on the road out toward Praiano, stands Le Sirenuse, painted ox-blood red with white trim, an eighteenth-century villa once known as Giulietta that belonged to the Neapolitan Sersale family until 1951, when four siblings, the Marchesi Aldo, Anna, Franco and Paolo Sersale, inherited it from a childless cousin and opened it as a hotel of eight rooms. The villa had sheltered the family through the bombing of Naples in the Second World War, and it was Paolo, elected mayor of Positano in 1944 and re-elected three times after, who convinced the American general Mark Clark to designate the town a rest stop for Allied troops, soldiers who came back years later with their wives and set off the tourism that built the Positano of today. Those original eight rooms grew into fifty-eight, spread now across two adjoining buildings, through the purchase of neighbouring properties over the following seven decades, and the name itself, meaning the sirens, nods to the islets of Li Galli below the terraces, long identified with the sirens of the Odyssey. The villa has never left the family: it is owned and run today by Franco's son, Antonio Sersale, and his wife, Carla, seventy-five years after his father and his father's siblings first opened its doors. The interiors are largely the work of Franco Sersale, the youngest of the four founding siblings and a chemical engineer by training, who came home in 1990 after decades abroad and spent the next twenty-five years filling the house with what he had collected: Central Asian textiles, Neapolitan paintings, eighteenth and nineteenth century European furniture, adding only what earned its place beside what was already there. Rooms are tiled in handmade Vietri ceramic, walled in white plaster, finished in walnut, and stocked with Eau d'Italie, the fragrance and skincare line another Sersale, Marina, developed with her husband, Sebastián Alvarez Murena, after a fiftieth-anniversary party planned for October 2001 was cancelled following the September 11th attacks, the brand finally launching in 2004, its scent built around sun-warmed terracotta in place of the citrus most Amalfi Coast brands reach for. Dinner is at La Sponda, one Michelin star, on the third floor, lit each night by four hundred candles and run by the chef Gennaro Russo, who trained under his predecessor, Matteo Temperini, and did a stint at Don Alfonso 1890 before taking the kitchen, built on Campanian produce and the catch brought in each morning by the fishermen working the bay below: lemon risotto with capers, San Pietro in a citrus sauce. The Champagne and Oyster Bar has its own terrace for the view, the third floor Don't Worry Bar, named for a Martin Creed neon piece and redone by the designer Annalisa Bellettati in 2021, for something quieter, and the spa, designed in 2000 by the architect Gae Aulenti and left empty of decoration but for Franco Sersale's own black and white travel photographs, for the granite steam room and an ice room lit from behind by onyx. What Le Sirenuse offers, more than any single room or view, is the sensation of staying inside someone's actual house, because for most of the last seventy-five years it more or less was: the portraits in the stairwell are family ancestors, the houseplants are tended by an actual relation, Giulia Sersale, a cousin of Antonio's, who treats the job as her profession and not a hobby, and the staff, many of whom have worked there for decades, greet returning guests with the kind of recognition that feels earned and not rehearsed. It is busy and it is social, full of guests who book the same room every July and run into each other at the Champagne Bar before dinner, the pool terrace by midday carrying the energy of a small, well-dressed town square, which makes it the wrong hotel for anyone hoping to disappear. What it is not is precious about itself: the contemporary art commissioned since 2015, Martin Creed's neon, Stanley Whitney's color, hangs beside centuries of Sersale family portraiture without either side performing for the other, rarer in hotels at this level than it should be. You should not come to Le Sirenuse for anonymity, for a private beach (there is not one, the public pebble beach is a short walk down and shared with the rest of Positano), or for interiors that read as restrained: the antiques and the maiolica and the pattern are a great deal, built up across three generations and not styled for a single opening season. You should not come if August on this coast is more than you can take, since Positano in August is Positano in August regardless of which hotel you are in. You should come for what is harder to find along this coast now, legible here in the family who still run the place themselves, in the fishermen the kitchen still buys from each morning, and in the four hundred candles at La Sponda that get lit every night of the season whether or not anyone is there to see them. The short version: An eighteenth-century villa above Positano, run by the same Sersale family since 1951, now fifty-eight rooms, one Michelin star at La Sponda, and a spa by Gae Aulenti, entirely family owned three generations on.