Adults Only
A hotel policy, a life choice, and the universe’s sense of humour.
It took me three years to make the decision.
Not because I was uncertain — I am rarely uncertain, it is both my greatest quality and Filippo’s greatest challenge — but because adults only felt like a statement. A door closing. A sign on the gate saying: you, yes. You with the adorable small person: not today.
I wanted a place open to everyone, filled with love. Warm, welcoming, convivial. A home you could step into. And then I realised something that took me embarrassingly long to understand:
Everyone means no one.
If you try to make everyone happy you end up with a place that has no personality, no soul, and no one who feels truly at home. The best things in life have a point of view. So do the best hotels. I always find myself quoting Nadine @ The Stanza (ha!)
But the decision didn’t come from a philosophy. It came from a pool.
One afternoon I was sitting by the restaurant looking at the terrace when two children ran down to the pool and jumped in. They were wonderful — joyfully, magnificently happy in the way that only children at a pool in Sicily in summer can be. They gave me joy just watching them.
And then I noticed the three couples who had been lying around the pool — sleeping, reading, existing in that particular state of horizontal bliss that you only achieve when you have truly, completely switched off — stand up one by one, collect their things, and leave.
Took me a moment.
I could make the children happy. Or I could make the couples happy. I could not, on a terrace of that size, do both simultaneously.
I chose the couples.
I want Principe to be a place where people recharge and feel beauty. Really recharge — the kind that requires silence and stillness and the ability to fall asleep by a pool without being cannonballed on. That is not a judgement on children. Children are wonderful. I love them. It is simply a clarity about what this place is for.
Saying no to twenty percent of your requests is a strong decision. The first year I told myself: you deserve to stay empty if that’s what you’ve chosen. But I have come to believe that in a world where everyone is trying to please everyone, knowing exactly who you are and what you offer is not a limitation.
It is a luxury.
Life is funny in its own way.
The year I made this decision — year three, adults only, no children at Principe — I was in Israel. In a clinic. Having eggs retrieved as part of an IVF process that had already taken me through Hamburg and Jeddah and more hormone injections than I care to remember.
I was, in other words, doing everything medically possible to have a child.
While simultaneously deciding that my hotel would not allow them.
I did briefly think: if this works, can I bring the baby? And the answer, honestly, was probably not — I would never have wanted to force the hotel on my own child, and I would have kept the two things separate regardless.
But still. The irony was not lost on me. Even at the time, sitting in a clinic in Tel Aviv full of hormones and hope, I found it slightly funny.
The universe, it turns out, has excellent comic timing.
2020 arrived and turned everything upside down. Covid arrived, Filippo left his corporate life, we packed the cat and the house and the life, organised a rescue flight out of Tel Aviv when the world closed, and landed on Salina permanently. Chaotic, exhausting, and somehow exactly right — which is a fairly accurate description of most good decisions.
All of this while I was still navigating the other thing. The losses. The hormones. The slow, honest process of finally asking myself the right questions.
Not am I trying hard enough — I was trying extraordinarily hard, anyone who has been through IVF knows there is no harder trying. The real question was quieter and more uncomfortable than that:
Is this what I actually want? Or is this what I think I should want?
Those are not the same question. I sat with it - for a long long time. And then — not in a single moment, nothing dramatically, but with the quiet clarity that comes when you finally stop running from an answer — I decided I was okay with a different kind of future. I am someone who moves forward. Feeling stuck is more painful to me than changing direction. And I have learned, that changing direction with full conviction feels less like a loss and more like — knowing your point of view. Knowing what your place is for.
Both decisions asked the same two things of me: honesty and courage.
Turns out I had enough of both.
Principe di Salina is adults only.
My life, it turns out, is also adults only.
One I chose deliberately, on an afternoon by a pool watching couples leave. The other arrived the way the best and hardest things do — not all at once, not according to plan, but undeniably, eventually, mine.
That’s funny, I think sometimes, sitting by that same pool watching someone fall asleep in the afternoon sun with absolutely nothing to do and nowhere to be.
That’s funny, and it wasn’t deliberated, and it’s exactly right.
People are recharging. Reading books. The pool is quiet. The universe is laughing somewhere.
So am I.
Con affetto,
Anita