IL GUSTO IMPECCABILE DI FRANCO SERSALE

In this fourth instalment of a series of 70^th anniversary posts dedicated to the history of Le Sirenuse, we turn our attention to Franco Sersale, the youngest of the four siblings who founded the hotel in 1951. Franco was a chemical engineer whose work took him around the world, so for many years he had very little to do with the running of a resort that he had first known as a child, when it was still his family’s seaside villa and, later, their wartime refuge from the chaos and confusion of Naples.

Franco Sersale left us in January 2015 while on yet another of his far-flung trips – this one a return visit to Udaipur in the Indian state of Rajasthan. Eight months earlier, in May 2014, the Sirenuse Journal’s Lee Marshall had sat down with the then 86-year-old Sersale patriarch at breakfast on the hotel terrace to talk about his curation of Le Sirenuse’s furniture and artworks. Other things got in the way, as they do, and the recording of that conversation languished somewhere in the Cloud for years. The hotel’s 70^th anniversary provided an ideal opportunity to listen to it again – and be reminded of what a distinctive voice and vision Franco possessed.

Don Francesco Saverio dei Marchesi Sersale, to give him his full name, opened the interview by revealing the simple secret behind his flair for interior design. “I’ve always been interested in looking”, he told the Sirenuse Journal. “If you don’t look, you don’t see anything”.

 

Franco’s older brother Aldo had found himself reluctantly at the helm of Le Sirenuse when Paolo’s health began to fail. One of the first things this bon viveur and ladies’ man asked his younger sibling on the latter’s return to Positano was whether he would mind taking over the running of the hotel? Franco refused point blank. “I told him I didn’t know anything about hotel management”, he confides. However, one thing he did know, he informed his brother, was that it was time to revamp Le Sirenuse “so as not to be left behind by the competition”. Now this was a job Franco felt he could and should take on. “Aldo had no taste at all”, Franco said with a sigh, “and he commissioned an architect who made a lot of mistakes”.

Over the following twenty-five years, beginning with the lobby and restaurant, Franco would transform Le Sirenuse, remaking it in his own elegant, discreet, cultured, well-travelled image. This was no sudden, radical makeover, but a slow amelioration, chair by chair, tile by tile, Suzani wall hanging by walnut console. It was so gradual that loyal guests who came back year after year would be hard pressed to say quite what had changed in their absence – only to concede, a couple of decades later, that pretty much everything had.

The former chemical engineer had helped to construct modernity around the world, but he was sure right from the start that this was not the right approach for Le Sirenuse. “I think there is no need, at least to my taste, to buy modern furniture, because the time comes when you just want to throw it away”, he opined with his usual directness. The only concession he made to modernism was the hotel Spa, designed by Franco’s architect friend Gae Aulenti and inaugurated in 2001.

 

Elsewhere, Franco worked on two fronts. One of the things, he knew, that attracted people to the Amalfi Coast was the simplicity and elegance of its traditional houses, the materials they were made from, and the furniture they contained. So he set about not only finding restorers who were able to conserve and refresh the original décor of the family villa that became Le Sirenuse, but also contacting craftsmen or artisanal firms who could seamlessly extend these details with new work done within a traditional idiom.

One such was Fornace De Martino, a ceramics company based in the village of Rufoli, in the hills above Salerno, that has been in the same family for more than five centuries. Franco reached out to the company soon after his arrival in Positano to ask if they could match some of Le Sirenuse’s ancient floor tiles, and also reproduce the patterns of some antique tiles he had acquired on his travels. The challenge proved to be a formative one. Tommaso De Martino explains that “until we started supplying ceramic tiles to Le Sirenuse, we’d worked principally in terracotta”. But Franco liked the company’s work so much, not to mention their reliance on two early Medieval kilns, “that he suggested we moved into glazed ceramics in order to make tiles for the hotel of the quality he required”. This is now Fornace De Martino’s principle line of business, and they still have a close relationship with Le Sirenuse (their pearly white floor tiles can be admired at Franco’s Bar, the streetside watering hole inaugurated in the summer of 2015 in honour of Le Sirenuse’s style maestro).

In the age of Instagram, how many of us are even able to single out the one worthwhile photo from the hundreds we take and post? But it was this demanding pursuit of beauty that made Franco Sersale, and the ambience he created in Positano, so very special.

 

 

 

Special thanks to Michael Maren, one of the guiding lights of Sirenland Writers Conference, for permission to use his lovely portrait of Franco as our headline shot.

The black and white photo above was taken by Franco Sersale while travelling in Bhutan.

The Hipstamatic photo below of Franco Sersale and Jennifer Pastore was taken by Yorgos Kordakis in 2013.

All other photos © Roberto Salomone