Le Sirenuse Waited Seventy-Five Years to Open a Second Address

Positano has one hotel that has never needed a name check. This summer, for the first time in 75 years, it has two addresses instead of one.

Le Sirenuse opened in 1951, when the Sersale siblings — Anna, Aldo, Paolo and Franco — converted their family villa above Positano's harbor into an eight-room hotel. Three generations later it is fifty-eight rooms, one Michelin star at La Sponda under the chef Gennaro Russo, and a guest history that runs from Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton to John Steinbeck, who wrote about the hotel in Harper's Bazaar before most of the world had heard of the Amalfi Coast. What the family never did, through all of it, was open a second property. Restraint was the brand.

That changed on April 23, when Antonio and Carla Sersale — joined this generation by their sons Aldo and Francesco — opened Le Sirenuse Mare, a beach club twenty-five minutes away by boat in Nerano, a fishing village the Amalfi crowds have mostly passed over. Five years in the planning, the 2,500-square-metre site holds two jetties, a 180-cover restaurant built around Neapolitan simplicity, three bars, and a garden by the landscape architect Paolo Pejrone laid out around twelve Aleppo pines. It is also the first outpost, outside Positano itself, of Emporio Sirenuse, the family's own clothing line.

The instinct is to read this as expansion. It reads truer as the same instinct applied twice: take a piece of coastline most people have overlooked, and make it the address that matters. Nerano asked nothing more of the family than Positano once did — a good jetty and a view worth sitting still for.

There is no road that gets you to Le Sirenuse Mare directly. The launch from the hotel, a water taxi, or your own tender — that is the only way in, and on this stretch of coast, in the middle of a season when everywhere else is reachable by car, that turns out to be most of the appeal.

— Camille