Notes From Nancy: Positano

TLF IC Nancy Novogrod spent 21 years as the Editor in Chief of Travel + Leisure. Notes from Nancy is her collection of memories from a life well traveled and her musings for the future.

The first time I visited Positano, I was with my college roommate on a driving trip from north to south in Italy. It was the summer of our junior year, and we stayed in a simple pensione almost at the pinnacle of this fishing village whose over 18,000 steps wind precipitously down to the rocky Mediterranean beach and wooden dock. It was the 1970s and Posi, as it is known, was a forerunner of what today would be called a Boho Chic hangout—the chic part centered on the filmmaker Franco Zeffirelli’s house, now the lovely Villa Tre Ville hotel.  I cannot say that we got there.

It was almost two decades later, and I was the Editor in Chief of House & Garden when one of the magazine’s contributors, an elegant Italian woman, asked whether she could bring a friend to dinner. The friend was Franco Sersale, a Barone, who had spent part of his career as a chemical engineer in Iran and now presided over Le Sirenuse in Positano in his former family home. The hotel has since passed down to Franco’s son, Antonio, and his elegant Milanese wife, Carla, but Franco’s spirit lives on in the decoration—much of the furniture and art was bought by Franco from dealers and at auction—and, more recently, in Franco’s Bar, which it would not be an exaggeration to say is the most popular watering hole in town.

I have been back to Positano and Le Sirenuse many times over the years with my husband and earlier on with our two children, and nothing conjures up summer more vividly for me than my mental images of cocktails at sunset in the hotel’s champagne bar or lunch at Lo Scoglio, a restaurant in a cove accessible by the Sersale’s glamorous Riva, which serves almost indescribably flavorful pasta with zucchini and fresh-from-the sea grilled fish—or simply sitting on the terrace outside our room overlooking the terracotta-tiled rooftops and the church and its colorful Ottoman-style dome. It is my version of la dolce vita, and I can’t think of anywhere else I’d rather spend a week this summer or any summer.