Atop the volcanic cliffs on the tranquil Salina, one woman has created a respite where art and nature reside in perfect harmony.
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.
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