Whether you take the slow ferry from Naples or the hydrofoil from Anzio, near Rome, it is something of an adventure to reach the island of Ponza. As soon as...
Whether you take the slow ferry from Naples or the hydrofoil from Anzio, near Rome, it is something of an adventure to reach the island of Ponza. As soon as its lands come into view across the bright blue waters, however, the vicissitudes of the journey are forgiven and forgotten. Dramatic cliffs rise from the ocean and simple neoclassical villas, painted in the mouthwatering colors of Neapolitan ice creams, dot the hills, which are ablaze with ginestre, the brilliant yellow flower of the gorse bushes that scramble over the undulating landscape.
Running from the harbor which, during summer, is filled with the yachts of visiting Italian grandees jostling for space with local fishing boats—are steep cobbled lanes that snake narrowly between thickly clustered houses. It is here, in the middle of the bustling village, that Silvia Fendi, design scion of the Roman luxury fur and accessories house, has found a holiday refuge—a place to spend high summer with her husband, the Roman lawyer Alessandro Luciano, and their four children. In August, as private boats from the mainland often stop at Ponza, the Fendis always have to be prepared for unexpected company. “You can never make plans, because friends are always coming and going,” explains Fendi. “It’s like living in a lighthouse!”
Fendi’s mother, Anna, another creative force in the family company, who also has a house on the island, helped her daughter make her home in this village. “Everybody in Rome goes to Capri or Sardinia,” says Silvia. “But that’s too crowded for me. Here, tourism is really only just starting. It’s still a really wild place.” Ponzesi are a feisty island people, famously skeptical of outsiders. But happily, their insular spirit has preserved the island from the more rigorous onslaughts of commercial tourism and its attendant unifications. In high summer, they are especially hospitable hosts, who rent out beds that they cram dormitory-style all over their houses, to make room when the island population of less than 14,000 increases tenfold. A friend of Fendi’s remembers a stay when he was wakened by a braying donkey that had been sleeping undisturbed behind a curtain next to his bed.Anna worked with her daughter to beautify the house, knocking a trio of tiny chambers into one great living room and adding a library mezzanine. Silvia also restored the room’s original tall French windows. These had inexplicably been replaced decades ago “when the real point of the room is the incredible view!” The terrace, decorated with pots of cactus, is designed for alfresco dining. The housekeeper Maria was a cook at Acqua Pazza, a celebrated local restaurant, and her magnificent meals, including such local delicacies as polpette di merluzzo (codfish balls) and zuppa di lenticchie (lentil soup), are a focal point of family life in the house. “The trouble with Ponza is that you just eat!” says Fendi, laughing. Between meals, balmy days are spent exploring the archipelago of local islands in the family boat, including Palmarola, an uninhabited jewel of the Mediterranean. “I can’t live without the sea,” says Fendi, “and this house is like living on a boat!”
Throughout the house runs a patchwork of boldly patterned antique Southern Italian tiles, which were found by Anna, who also used some to redecorate a favorite local restaurant, da Masaniello. Like the eccentric colors and charming inconsistencies of Silvia’s collection of Murano glass tumblers—all test pieces created by apprentice glassblowers—the tiles betray a bohemian spirit. (In the late eighties, Silvia lived with her first husband in Rio, where she claims to have “led a sort of hippie life—no furs because of the heat and no bags because they’d be stolen. I loved it!”)
Silvia’s eclectic tastes inform her work as design coordinator for the family company, established by her formidable grandparents Adele and Eduardo in 1925. Silvia collaborates with her mother and Karl Lagerfeld; she is the one, in fact, who created the famous Baguette bag. To date, more than half a million, in a giddy range of quirky fabrications, have been sold. The Ponza house is evidently as inspiring as it is relaxing. A prized pair of console tables, for instance, by the designer Carlo Bugatti—in vellum, ebony, and beaten copper—influenced the design of this season’s Fendi Ostrik bag, and Silvia’s Tote bags resemble the naively embroidered cushions throughout the house. Thousands of suggestions, she says, can come from something as seemingly insignificant as a stone “worked” by water.