Il Pellicano

On a headland at Porto Ercole on the Monte Argentario promontory in southern Tuscany, Il Pellicano has been one of Italy’s most coveted private retreat addresses since it was founded in 1965 by an English couple who had fallen in love with the Argentario coast and created a small hotel that has since become the defining expression of the Tuscan Riviera aesthetic — unfussy, deeply comfortable, entirely Italian, and possessed of the specific social quality that comes from a property that has attracted successive generations of the same families across sixty years of continuous operation. The 50 rooms, suites, and cottages are distributed through the cliffside property, with sea-facing terraces, private gardens, and the celebrated saltwater pool cut into the granite cliff above the Tyrrhenian giving each accommodation a quality of private marine engagement that the Argentario’s sheltered coves are uniquely suited to provide.

The restaurant Pelligano’s menus have been awarded a Michelin star for their engagement with the Maremma’s culinary heritage and the Argentario’s seafood — the acquapazza preparations of the Tuscan coast, the Orbetello lagoon eel and mullet, and the exceptional quality of fish from these particular Tyrrhenian waters — in a kitchen that manages the tension between the hotel’s relaxed summer atmosphere and the seriousness of its cooking with considerable skill. The cliff pool and the mooring for private boats give the property its most distinctive physical qualities. The Maremma’s Etruscan archaeological sites, the natural reserve of the Laguna di Orbetello, and the medieval fortified towns of Capalbio and Pitigliano are within day-trip range.

Il Pellicano’s continued relevance six decades after its founding rests on the quality of the place itself — the cliffside position, the light, the sea access — and on the management’s understanding that the hotel’s most important asset is its social character, which requires protection from the visual language and service conventions of international luxury hotels as much as it requires investment in the material fabric of the property.