She’s a Natural

It’s perhaps no surprise that when the famed hotelier Marie-Louise Sciò wants to disconnect, she escapes to remote spots that are more about commingling with nature than fraternizing with the jet set. Over the years, the Italian-raised Sciò, who presides as the CEO and creative director of Pellicano Group, has disappeared to Patagonia in Argentina and Sweden’s Lapland, often accompanied by her now-22-year-old son.

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“I love the landscapes of those places,” says Sciò, who studied design and architecture at Rhode Island School of Design before joining her family’s hotel empire. One July afternoon her “office” is a table perched under the bougain-villea-draped terrace at Il Pellicano, the legendary cliffside hotel on the Tuscan coast that has attracted royalty, movie stars, and celebrities for the last near-60 years. In 1979, her father, Roberto Sciò purchased the property, transforming it into one of the world’s most iconic resorts—one that the likes of Slim Aarons would spend years documenting.

While Il Pellicano serves as the sun-soaked crown jewel of the hotel empire, Sciò also presides over La Posta Vecchia, a restored 17th-century villa just outside Rome that was once owned by J. Paul Getty. “It’s filled with Renaissance furniture, so it has this grandiose vibe. We have the best parties there,” she says. And then there’s Mezzatorre, a glamorous spa resort, complete with thermal springs, on the volcanic island of Ischia. Sciò loves that the property still possesses that ineffable charm of Italy in the ’50s and ’60s. (The hotel group recently partnered with a European real-estate firm to open a slate of new hotels, the first one to open outside Siena, Italy in 2027.)

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Relaxing in nature seems like the ideal balm for Sciò, who spends her summer days shuttling between properties and mingling with guests. (Many are longtime regulars who barely leave the property.) “I meet all sorts of people here, many friends of friends,” she says. “We hang out, have a drink, and chat about all sorts of things. Everything just unfolds.” When she was younger, Sciò would stay at Il Pellicano from morning to midnight, working and socializing. “It was a constant blur, but I loved it because this place has this energy all day long,” she remembers. These days, however, she maintains more of a work-life balance, heading home at night to unwind with a movie or a book.

But when she is on-site, she’s laser focused. “I’m an obsessive aesthete,” says Sciò. You can see her signature style—Italian glam, with a touch of rock 'n' roll—everywhere at the properties, from the libraries, for which she personally selected each book, to the custom-made bath products, to her lifestyle website Issimo, which showcases the best of Italy, including Apulian ceramics and jaunty striped beach towels. She looks around at her fairy-tale surroundings and admits: “There could be worse places to work.”