ON SALINA, THE second largest and most verdant of the seven Aeolian islands, change comes slowly, if at all. The volcanic archipelago off the northern coast of Sicily is a UNESCO World Heritage site but, even without that designation, which places a ban on things like new construction and painting houses a color other than white, Salina might idle forever, quietly serene and proudly inaccessible.
During the summer months, though, a hydrofoil ferry drops off a couple of dozen visitors after a choppy trip from the port of Milazzo. The passengers are mostly Milanese or Romans headed for a respite at one of the few rustic boutique hotels there that are repurposed from old homes. Unlike the neighboring island of Panarea — with its famed disco scene and celebrity residents — Salina counts among its major attractions its twisted vines of Malvasia grapes, cascading caper bushes, jagged cliffs descending to the aqua Tyrrhenian Sea and the scents of jasmine, honeysuckle and lemon that perfume the breeze.
By such stringently slow standards — or any standards, really — Cecilia Morelli, 42, moves in a blur. Since 2021, she and her 10-year-old daughter, Gaia, have split their year between an apartment in London’s Notting Hill and a whitewashed Salina compound on a switchback road high above the tiny towns of Malfa and Santa Marina. Morelli bought it from an older couple who had built it into the side of a cliff in the late 1960s. Securing it required characteristic pluck: She had long dreamed of owning a place on Salina, where she’d stayed on several occasions in the 2010s at the minimal yet luxurious hotel Capafaro. During that time, she slipped her number to a local boat captain so he would tip her off if he heard of an owner looking to sell.
Although her marriage was splintering when she purchased the villa, she forged ahead, as she had done many times before. Raised in London by an Italian father and a French mother, Morelli (a T Magazine contributing editor) chose Yale over Oxford or Cambridge, did a short stint as a Hollywood assistant and wound up in New York as a buyer at Bergdorf Goodman. In 2010, she married and moved to Mumbai, where her former husband’s family is from, and opened Le Mill, the subcontinent’s first multibrand luxury emporium, which she stocked with such labels as the Row and Celine.
A LESS HARDY soul recovering from a divorce might have chosen a more convenient vacation locale. The remote island’s season lasts less than three months, and virtually everything has to be brought in by boat and hauled up a harrowingly narrow road of blind curves. But Morelli, who was also running Le Mill from afar, reveled in the challenge.
After closing on the Salina compound in February 2021, she set about furnishing the meandering eight-bedroom property, which is spread over three structures. In a manner that characterizes her precise yet cyclonic approach to life, she traveled to India, to the March antiques fair in Parma, Italy, and to the Paris flea market at Saint-Ouen to round up a container load of vintage and custom furniture and textiles. “I knew exactly what I needed for every inch of the place,” she says. “I make very quick decisions and don’t really need measurements. I can look and instantly know.” Despite the logistics of getting so many belongings to such an obscure location, by the time summer came a mere three months later, the two houses and free-standing three-suite guest quarters were entirely furnished as though they had forever been that way — an effortless mix of the disparate worlds she has spent her life occupying.
From the veranda’s long, L-shaped banquette, upholstered in aubergine Pierre Frey linen, a roof of palm fronds shields you from the sun. As you gaze through the lush vegetation, you can see three of the other Aeolians: Lipari, Panarea and Stromboli, where a still-active volcano erupts in jets of lava every 20 minutes. Without such a landmark, it would be hard to know where you were. Is this Kerala in India’s junglelike south? Seaside Tangier, with its flush of pink oleander and tuberose? Sicily, with its ragged, unadorned shores and bleached-out bliss?
Her choice of furnishings further obscures your precise location, as is her intention; this is her peripatetic life in situ. From a pair of rattan chaises and blackened cast-iron side tables to a humble unglazed clay vessel from the barely populated neighboring island of Filicudi and armchairs designed by the midcentury Sri Lankan architect Geoffrey Bawa, Morelli’s taste is informed by contour, texture and craft, jumping the guardrails of vernacular expression or any particular style. The décor, she says, “is sort of everywhere but nowhere, now and also a long time ago, which I really like.”
From early June to late August, Morelli hosts a revolving cast of friends from each chapter of her life. For visitors, the experience is at once tranquil and enlivening. With enough space for everyone to have privacy — the house fits 22 when at capacity — her few rules are inviolable and, because this is Italy, revolve around food. Giusy, a local chef, sticks to a schedule: Breakfast, consisting of a fresh-baked crostata and fruit, is served from 8 to 10 in the morning. Lunch, usually spaghetti alle vongole or another seafood pasta, is at 1 and aperitivi are at 7, when locally caught anchovies appear. Dinner is at 8:30 and most often features a local fish like sea bass with tart capers and a particularly creamy ricotta found only on the nearby island of Vulcano. In between are boat trips, snorkeling and a stop in Malfa for coffee granita. Intrepid types are invited to join Morelli on her daily mile-long swim, which begins with a walk down a precarious overgrown donkey path to a dilapidated jetty where the ferry used to stop long ago. There are jellyfish in the water, she notes, but “you can just push them to the side and, anyway, the sting goes away after a day or two.” To recover, she suggests lounging on the cushioned platform covered by a thatched roof that she refers to as the solarium, which is 20 or so yards from the main house.
That house’s interiors are spare and a bit shadowy as a relief from the summer sun and are largely free of art. “I don’t think that’s where you want your focus,” says Morelli. But thoughtfully chosen objects stand out against the biscuit-colored plaster walls: a tribal-inspired black-and-white tiered ceramic lamp by the Italian potter Barbara Frua topped with a fringed conical shade; an Italian antique hall table arrayed with a local ceramist’s tiny glazed clay trays, each holding a delicate necklace or pairs of earrings; 1970s spiky, high-backed wooden dining chairs, which she found at the Paris puces, made by a Scottish craftsman channeling his fellow countryman the designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh.
While much of the property is awash in calming neutrals, allowing the yellow broom and magenta bougainvillea that climb the exterior to stand out, there are nods to the years Morelli lived in India. She hired Pictalab, an all-female team of decorative painters from Milan, to tint the interior walls. The guest rooms are adorned in shades of ocher and powdered rose with hand-painted trompe l’oeil frescoes and, in a corner of her pale gray bathroom where the ceiling meets the walls, there is a mural of an octopus, its tentacles curling around the frame of the casement window. Her daughter’s playroom on the lower level is turquoise and pale pink with painted scallops — “like the sea,” she says.
Night falls almost silently on Salina, and that’s when Morelli leans back on the terrace banquette in contented repose. After decades of building and rebuilding, of putting down stakes and having to yank them out of the earth, here on this ancient mound of volcanic rock, surrounded by the beautiful things she’s brought to it, she has at last found home.
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