On the eve of its 50th anniversary, one of Italy’s most storied hotels is primed to turn a vibrant, chic and thoughtful face forward, courtesy of its farsighted third-generation owners
Story MARIA SHOLLENBARGER
This is the story of a hotel, which contains within it the story of a family, and a village, and a coastline, and an entire era of bygone glamour, and even a next chapter of sorts. It starts, as so many good things do, in Italy – specifically, on the Amalfi Coast. Positano, anno 1962: local boy Carlo Cinque, known to all as Carlino, was a sometime lobster fisherman and budding hospitality magnate who had some years earlier taken a small villa in Positano town and parlayed it into the Albergo Miramare, a four-star hotel that rapidly became a smashing success. His timing was fortuitous: the Amalfi Coast, a string of fishing villages scattered like rough multi-hued gems across precipitous bluffs tumbling directly into the Tyrrhenian, had latterly come onto the radar of the cognoscenti, and they were arriving in ever greater numbers. Which was good, because Carlino Cinque had big ideas. These largely centred on a promontory that seemed to shear directly up out of the sea, just above Laurito Beach, known locally as La Punta, which he would admire sometimes from his boat below. At its summit, just off the coastal trail, was a tiny stone chapel dedicated to Peter, patron saint of fishermen.
Cinque first conspired to buy the land, then he built himself a little villetta and a garden at the edge of the precipice. Then a couple of rooms were added, and another couple. As the years passed and his idea took shape, a happy accretion of spaces and levels grew across the cliffside. Some faced the cerulean sea, or the islets of Li Galli and, beyond them the distant bluffs of Capri; others looked south to Vettica Maggiore, the picturesque northern side of Praiano, and the Lattari mountains as they disappeared into the haze to the southeast. And still others, of course, admired bella Positano herself, two kilometres up the coast, glowing fetchingly in the evenings.
As he built, Cinque would buzz out onto the sea in his gozzo for a perspective on where and how to sculpt the rock to accommodate new rooms, gardens, a vast drinks terrace – and eventually, an elevator that plummeted from the clifftop straight down almost 300 feet through the rock face to the spectacular natural private seaside bathing platform and beach bar. He was determined to muddle the boundary between indoors and the ravishing outdoors: openings were made in walls or windowpanes to accommodate creeping vines, and the terraces and patios of the rooms were bowered in wisteria and bougainvillea. In 1970, Il San Pietro di Positano – Cinque’s 33-room, five-star hotel – opened for business.
This is the story of a hotel, which contains within it the story of a family, and a village, and a coastline, and an entire era of bygone glamour, and even a next chapter of sorts. It starts, as so many good things do, in Italy – specifically, on the Amalfi Coast. Positano, anno 1962: local boy Carlo Cinque, known to all as Carlino, was a sometime lobster fisherman and budding hospitality magnate who had some years earlier taken a small villa in Positano town and parlayed it into the Albergo Miramare, a four-star hotel that rapidly became a smashing success. His timing was fortuitous: the Amalfi Coast, a string of fishing villages scattered like rough multi-hued gems across precipitous bluffs tumbling directly into the Tyrrhenian, had latterly come onto the radar of the cognoscenti, and they were arriving in ever greater numbers. Which was good, because Carlino Cinque had big ideas. These largely centred on a promontory that seemed to shear directly up out of the sea, just above Laurito Beach, known locally as La Punta, which he would admire sometimes from his boat below. At its summit, just off the coastal trail, was a tiny stone chapel dedicated to Peter, patron saint of fishermen.
Cinque first conspired to buy the land, then he built himself a little villetta and a garden at the edge of the precipice. Then a couple of rooms were added, and another couple. As the years passed and his idea took shape, a happy accretion of spaces and levels grew across the cliffside. Some faced the cerulean sea, or the islets of Li Galli and, beyond them the distant bluffs of Capri; others looked south to Vettica Maggiore, the picturesque northern side of Praiano, and the Lattari mountains as they disappeared into the haze to the southeast. And still others, of course, admired bella Positano herself, two kilometres up the coast, glowing fetchingly in the evenings.
As he built, Cinque would buzz out onto the sea in his gozzo for a perspective on where and how to sculpt the rock to accommodate new rooms, gardens, a vast drinks terrace – and eventually, an elevator that plummeted from the clifftop straight down almost 300 feet through the rock face to the spectacular natural private seaside bathing platform and beach bar. He was determined to muddle the boundary between indoors and the ravishing outdoors: openings were made in walls or windowpanes to accommodate creeping vines, and the terraces and patios of the rooms were bowered in wisteria and bougainvillea. In 1970, Il San Pietro di Positano – Cinque’s 33-room, five-star hotel – opened for business.
The rest is, if not precisely history, a pretty compelling narrative. Throughout the ’70s and ’80s, an era when the word “jetsetter” assumed its full primacy, the San Pietro was a polestar for them. Heads of state and royals, film and stage megastars, fat-cat bankers and landed gentry all made their way down the peninsula to stay – for a night, a week or, in Peter O’Toole’s case, a whole month – at Carlino Cinque’s fabled eyrie. Agnelli was there, as was Nureyev, and Gregory Peck and Anthony Quinn, and, later, Streisand and Hoffman and the King of Jordan.
Cinque padrone passed away in 1984, and his niece, Virginia Attanasio, assumed ownership and management of the hotel together with her brother Salvatore. When Salvatore died in 1996, the baton went to Virginia’s young sons, Vito and Carlo.
The challenges presented by a place such as the San Pietro are manifold. There’s upkeep, of course; the sea air is famously brutal on surfaces and materials, and exteriors and interiors often refurbished on a near-annual basis to preserve those immaculate white plaster walls. And there’s getting the right balance of guests – that fragile ecosystem of humanity that’s never too much of one nationality – and of privacy versus conviviality.
But above all else, there is the high-rise tightrope walk between upholding tradition and heritage, and maintaining relevance. It’s here that Attanasio’s sons, the second-generation brothers Cinque, have excelled.
“Generally, people use tradition as an excuse to not change anything,” says Vito. “I believe the best way to honour the tradition of our family is to update everything to our modern times, while also respecting the strong identity of the place.
“After the two generations before us, we had the chance to make big changes that they did not have the financial possibility of realising, so we felt it was our duty to take the challenge of remodelling the hotel and moving it into the modern world. I think you have to deserve the place you’re in, and my brother and I have worked hard to do so.”
A rolling renovation of every room and suite has taken place over the past few years. The Cinques enlisted the skills of legendary designer Fausta Gaetani for the job. Gaetani is Rome based but her name is inextricably linked to Positano; she has authored spaces at Le Sirenuse and restored Renzo Mongiardino’s designs at Villa Tre Ville, and is known for cajoling the area’s finest artisans into creating joyous contemporary interpretations of age-old eccellenze, most notably the exquisite maiolica tile floors that Amalfi Coast enthusiasts the world over dream of in the off-season. Of the myriad patterns created, no one is used more than three times across its 57 rooms. And Vito Cinque owns all of them.
Exuberance of palette combines with restraint in each space: not one room or suite is cluttered, but they all hum with character. There’s not just blue, there’s turquoise and cornflower and teal and sky and azure and cyan. Nor is there plain yellow, but canary and lemon and dandelion and saffron and pineapple. Sofas and chairs are slipcovered in blinding white, or smartly clad in retro-chic linens and jacquards and stripes. Precision hits of gilt raise the glamour factor; original art confers refinement. Ceramic sculptures and vases in brilliant hues fill alcoves. The Virginia Suite – completed just a few months ago and renamed in honour of Attanasio – is a masterpiece of native design, with scarlet starfish studding a vast bi-level floor of undulating blue waves. Ethereal blue-crystal chandeliers are suspended from flawless white ceilings. Attanasio herself can still be found patrolling the premises most days, tweaking flower arrangements, polishing flutes and dusting baseboards if her eagle eye alights on anything that’s less than 100 per cent pristine. She also makes the sublime orange and lemon marmalades served at breakfast, as well as the limoncello and mirto liquore at the bar.
Which brings us to the key USP of the San Pietro: the Cinque family themselves. Thanks to the tireless attentions of the Cinques and their mother, as 2020 – the 50th anniversary of Carlino welcoming his first guests – approaches, you’d be hard-pressed to find a more beautiful hotel anywhere in Europe. It is definitively of its place, a self-contained oasis suspended over the sea, away from the bustle of Positano centro, merged – literally – with the coast that defines it. The San Pietro trades in unimpeachable old-world elegance, but nowhere in the welcome you receive, or the service throughout your stay, is there a trace of hauteur.
“I don’t think what distinguishes the hotel above others is the fact that 20 years ago we were already the most sustainable hotel here, or that we have the number-one kitchen in Europe, or that we produce all our fresh food organically,” says Vito – though all of those things are true. “What makes the hotel unique is the commitment of the staff who come to work as if they belong to the place; they have grown up with the place and the place has grown up with them. They love it like their home.”
Vito shares ownership of the hotel with his mother and brother, but he is its general manager, and as such, at its helm. It’s he who told Gaetani and her designers to really run with it in the new suites. (The story goes that what he actually said to the artisan tasked with painting the mural behind the bed in the Virginia suite was: “Pretend you’re Chagall. Drink a few litres of wine and smoke a joint. Then start painting the sea.”)
Vito’s farsightedness as custodian of his great-uncle’s legacy has encompassed one rather unexpected facet, given the indulgent luxury that is the hotel’s stock in trade: sustainability. Increasingly – sagely – he insists that a light footprint on the environment play a pivotal role in San Pietro’s future. Beyond the phytodepuration process that regenerates the soil in the orto and the flowerbeds, and the recycled groundwater and rainwater tanks for irrigation, there are the huge organic gardens that furnish the larders of the hotel’s two very different but equally spectacular restaurants – Michelin-starred Zass, and beachside Carlino, open for lunch only. On a steep coast where arable land is scarce indeed, the ingenuity with which Vito and Zass’ chef, Alois Vanlangenaker, have carved out so much space for produce and fruit and flowers is extraordinary. In 2016 Vito spent close to €3 million renovating the 400sq m kitchen at Zass; it’s now a sleek, gleaming showpiece in stainless steel, enamel and ceramic, as beautiful as any of the hotel rooms or suites – and equipped with state-of-the-art ozone sanitisation and heat recovery systems that help significantly reduce waste across the property.
Elsewhere there is Alcova, the hotel’s new drinking/lounging zone, carved right out of the lava rock near the entrance to Zass – the place to sip an Americano and read, or taste Italian gins, or convene for aperitivo. It’s a master class in leveraging space, clever and jewel box-like; a place to mix it up when you’ve done the inimitable main terrace a couple of nights in a row.
Down at the beach, meanwhile, is Carlino, which is open only to hotel guests. Carlino reprises the founder’s name, and also his ethos. It is the apotheosis of Mediterranean seaside lunchtime pleasure: cane roof, wood decking, simple scrolled wrought-iron chairs and tables, and wide-open views over the bathing platform, with its signature burnt-orange loungers and the placid Tyrrhenian glittering beyond. A fine, hot day, a glass of crisp Fiano di Avellino, and Carlino’s grilled mozzarella in lemon leaves – this is a sui generis San Pietro moment.
Soon, they’ll be delivering the evening edition of this moment as well. For the first time in its 12-year history, the 2020 season will see Carlino open for dinner too – lamp-lit, possibly even more atmospheric in the rich gloaming of a summer twilight, and still reliably, singularly delicious.
And what’s next for the Cinques? If you stand alongside the curve of the hotel’s crescent-shaped pool and look south towards Vettica Maggiore, you can make out a white two-storey building towards the bottom of the hillside, below the basilica and close to the sea, immersed in greenery. This is Villa delle Sirene, the seven-suite boutique hotel Vito is in the process of restoring. He’s not committing to an opening date just yet (though summer 2021 looks realistic), but when it’s done it will be a new, cleaner-lined iteration of the San Pietro aesthetic, with a decided eye to future generations – of guests, and Cinques alike.
In the meantime, he tends assiduously to the world his great-uncle envisioned 58 years ago, elaborating on it subtly but continuously. One hot afternoon last August, I was lunching at Carlino, watching Vito make the table rounds, greeting guests. Abruptly he excused himself and walked briskly down the stone path to the bathing platform, joining a line of his staff standing at attention at the dock, towards which a sleek tender was speeding from a colossal yacht anchored offshore. The CEO of a global luxury conglomerate, together with his wife and one of his sons, exited the boat; the four of them strolled slowly towards the restaurant, Vito and the businessman with heads bowed towards each other in easy conversation. He escorted the family to the table held for them in a prime space; after seating them and chatting a bit more, he left them to their lunch.
Later, I asked him about the encounter. The CEO is reliably at Carlino once a summer or so, I learn. He loves the San Pietro, is always full of praise for its timeless elegance. This man is famous in business circles for his pursuit and acquisition of family-owned luxury brands, among which are a handful of blue-chip hotels. Is he keen to make the San Pietro part of his stable, I ask.
Vito eyes me, a wry smile playing around his lips. He’s not telling. But one strongly suspects he’s also not selling – ever. The Cinques are Il San Pietro, and vice versa. End of story.
