THE HOTEL BAR YOU HAVE BEEN SEARCHING FOR IS HERE

The room that today hosts the Don’t Worry Music Bar was at the heart of the Sersale family villa that became Le Sirenuse in 1951. It was something of a cocoon, where family and friends would gather to chat, read or play cards. At some point in the evolution of the hotel, it was decided that this intimate space would make the perfect bar. Franco Sersale, who created Le Sirenuse’s tasteful interiors in his own refined image, found at auction a remarkable wooden workbench that had once belonged to an 18^th-century Neapolitan jeweller, with four inlaid panels depicting Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas. This was repurposed as the bar counter. Franco furnished the bar area and the room that fronts it towards the pool and restaurant terrace with stylish divans, tables and antique artworks, and it returned to being the quiet, convivial space that it had been when this was a family home.

And yet… sometimes it was a little too quiet in here. Except on rare rainy days, few guests opted to sit inside. The bar itself saw a great deal of wine-pouring and cocktail-shaking activity, but most was in the service of guests who were out on the terrace – both here on the third floor and upstairs in Aldo’s. It didn’t even have a name, other than “the hotel bar” – something that endeared it, especially in the cooler months, to aficionados of the genre, those who liked their Old Fashioned served in an ambience of old-fashioned, understated elegance.

Things began to change in 2016, thanks to an artwork. Working closely with Antonio and Carla Sersale and Artists at Le Sirenuse curator Silka Rittson-Thomas, British artist Martin Creed chose the traditional vaulted ceiling of the bar’s terrace-wards extension as the perfect setting for his neon installation ‘DON’T WORRY’. Four years later, the bar area was restyled by Rome-based architect and designer Annalisa Bellettati. The highlights of her dazzling refresh are the counter’s new batten and top in polished brass, and the backlit onyx panels that illuminate the rare spirit and mixer bottles in the oak cabinet behind.

 

For obvious reasons, the bar’s transformation was put on hold, together with much else, in the years immediately following Bellettati’s 2020 redesign. But finally, at the start of the 2024 season, the stars aligned, and a project that Antonio and Carla’s elder son Aldo had been nurturing for a while could finally be launched.

But the real innovation is the music. In keeping with the bar’s commitment to old-school analogue values, only vinyl is admitted. And in keeping with the bar’s focus on people, it it is spun by someone who is as experienced at creating moods through the records he plays as he is at reading his audience: DJ Paolo Cinque, who goes by Paolo Sciabu.

Born in 1979, Paolo developed a passion for dance music at an early age. But it wasn’t only the songs he was interested in, it was the mix. He became obsessed with the challenge that faces every DJ – “what comes next?” – and would imagine mixes in his head even back when he only had a cassette player.

When he was sixteen, his dad bought Paolo two secondhand Technics turntables and a few records – and he wore them out practicing. At the age of eighteen, he was already deejaying for friends’ parties, and by the time he was 21, he had become resident DJ at Positano’s Easy Pub, a small nightlife venue connected to the Buca di Bacco hotel-restaurant that those who frequented the resort around the turn of the millennium remember with affection. “It was one of the few places where locals and tourists really mixed”, Paolo recalls, “and the only club on the Amalfi Coast where you could dance that was open year round, even in winter”.

For Paolo, the ability to read the mood in the room is one of a DJ’s most important assets. “I’ve got to the point”, he reveals, “where I know instinctively not only what I’m going to put on next, but also how people are going to react to it”. Pressed, he’s happy gives the Journal an example. “Say I’m playing that fantastic George Benson cover of the Donny Hathaway song The Ghetto, which it’s impossible to listen to without swaying your hips or tapping your feet. Depending on the level of electricity in the room, I can take the pace up or cool it down with the next track. To take it up, I might select Rotation, a great, upbeat trumpet piece by Herb Alpert. If I feel that people want to chill a little more… then it would have to be Chris Isaak’s Wicked Game”.

One of the greatest satisfactions for any deejay – and Paolo is no exception – is when an evening really clicks. “The other night”, he recounts, “the bar wasn’t even that full, and the rhythm of the music was still quite slow, but I could tell that there was something special in the air, everyone was on the same wavelength, and somehow I was just getting every track right. At a certain point, one couple couldn’t stay sitting down – and as soon as they got up to dance, so did everybody else”.

 

The Don’t Worry Music Bar is open every evening from 7:00pm until late, with live vinyl from 9:30pm

 

Photos © Roberto Salomone