This is the thrid part of this story. And there will be more - read the first here, and don’t miss the second here.
The first guests I ever checked in arrived in a group of ten.
They didn’t speak English. They were hikers. They walked through the door of my freshly painted, carefully considered, vision-boarded-to-within-an-inch-of-its-life hotel in dirty boots, looked past the sea view, past the pendant lights, past everything — and one of them pointed at my beautiful deliberately positioned lamp in the corner and said, with great conviction, that it was in the wrong place.
I brought him a blue plastic IKEA lamp from the back.
I walked upstairs after settling the last one in, stood in the corridor, and thought: like this. I am not doing this like this.
I should say — I bought an existing hotel. The previous owners had left me some bookings as a courtesy, groups they had already committed to. I had never done a check-in in my life. I had never swiped a credit card as a hotelier. I was surviving on approximately two hours of sleep and the specific adrenaline of someone who has done something irreversible and is only now fully understanding that.
So in some ways, the German hikers were a gift. A very clarifying gift.
Because I had spent years as a brand strategist building frameworks for other people’s businesses — slide after slide about the importance of knowing your audience, one message, one direction, the courage to be specific. I believed every word of it. I had presented it with great conviction in many expensive rooms.
And now I was standing in my own corridor holding a horrid IKEA blue plastic lamp understanding that believing it and meaning it are two entirely different things.
Here is what I knew from the beginning, even when I knew nothing else: this job was going to require most of my hours, most of my days, and a relationship with sleep that could only be described as a distant memory. The only way I could survive inside it — genuinely survive, not just endure — was to make Principe an extension of me. To live inside it without pretending to be someone else.
Which meant the guests should feel like people I would want at my dinner party.
Not a specific demographic. Not a target group on a slide. People who notice small things. People who look for beauty without needing it explained. People who understand that a lamp placed in the left corner instead of next to the nightstand is a decision, not a mistake. People who come to Salina to actually find Salina — not to have it packaged and handed to them on a checklist.
I knew exactly who they were.
I had absolutely no idea how to find them.
Since I didn’t know how to reach them directly — and I was running on no sleep and pure adrenaline and the particular faith of someone who has burned the boats — I did what any sensible brand strategist does when they don’t know the answer.
I found the people who were already talking to them.
Lisa Poggi is a wedding photographer who shot couples the way I wanted Principe to feel — natural, elegant, unhurried, completely specific. She arrived with Tommaso from La Rosa Canina, who walked around the island before dawn foraging local flowers and built corners of living greenery inside the hotel from what he found. Island flowers. Not imported, not arranged, not what anyone else would have brought. The island itself, brought inside.
I watched him do it and felt something I hadn’t felt yet in that first season.
Recognition.
These people were seeing Principe for what it was supposed to be — and helping me get there.
Gianluca Gasperoni photographed everything. Made it still and perfect and completely true. He has been the only person to officially photograph Principe ever since — which tells you something about what those three days were. He is also, I should mention, the only person on this earth I can talk to non-stop for over an hour, hang up, and call back five minutes later with another theory about life for another hour. And I don’t ever like to talk on the phone (so, no, don’t call me). The universe rarely produces this combination of talent, vision, alignment, and someone who still picks up the phone at 11pm (and even 6am) to discuss the meaning of things. I am grateful for him in a way that has nothing to do with photography.
What the three of them created together in three days I will carry with me always.
It was the first time I saw Principe actually take life.
Lisa, Tommaso and Gianluca were still in the living room when the German hikers checked out.
I looked at them. I looked at the door closing behind the last hiker.
I said: not with them. I am not doing this with them.
I know how that sounds. I am in hospitality. I understand the instinct to say yes to everyone, fill the rooms, make it work regardless. Nadine from La Stanza — one of the sharpest people writing about luxury hospitality today, and someone who has no patience whatsoever for performing to the wrong audience — says something I think about often: her content is not for everyone, and that is precisely the point.
Those hikers were lovely people. Principe was simply not the right place for them. This is not a judgement — it is the honest, unglamorous, necessary work of knowing what you are and who you are for. Like falling in love, which also doesn’t work by consensus. You have to see each other. You have to speak the same language. When you do, you both know immediately. When you don’t, no amount of goodwill changes the fit.
What nobody tells you about having a vision is how lonely it is before anyone else can see it.
You are building something that doesn’t exist yet from materials that make complete sense only to you. You are explaining something you can’t fully explain yet. You are asking people to believe in something they can’t touch yet. And most days you are the only person in the room who can see where this is going.
What saves you — what I know now with the clarity of nine seasons — is not strategy or talent or the right mood board. It is the people around you. And you need three kinds.
The ones who see it. Lisa and Tommaso and Gianluca saw Principe before it was fully itself and helped bring it forward. These people are rare and the universe is not generous with them. When you find them, don’t let them leave. Or at least make sure Gianluca still picks up the phone (he does, always).
The ones who help you build what you don’t yet know how to build. Filippo was working in Jeddah when we were negotiating the purchase. He built my first financial plan from Saudi Arabia and sent it across with one line: I know you can do it. I have no doubts. He couldn’t see the updated mood board. He didn’t need to. He saw me. Which, as it turns out, was the only currency that actually mattered in year one.
And the ones who believe in you even when they don’t understand any of it. My parents were navigating their own fears — reasonably, lovingly, with the particular anxiety of people who had built something carefully and were watching their daughter do something slightly terrifying with it. There were moments. There was a night — the hotel was empty, my parents had gone for dinner, taking everything with them because why would you stay in an empty hotel — where I refused to leave. I stayed until 11pm. I turned on every light. I put on music. I sat in the hotel and waited, because I believed with complete conviction that if a guest came back that night they should return to warmth and life, not darkness and closed shutters.
That night, my dad and I had the biggest fight of the renovation. I said: this is not the business I am going to run. We do it this way or I am out.
He looked at me for a long moment.
He said: stay. We do it your way.
He didn’t understand the vision. He understood me. Which, in the end, was exactly the same thing.
Thanks to the Principe I get to meet many incredible people. I love the kind of guests who arrive and somehow the whole table rearranges itself around him/her — not because they try, but because that is simply what happens when someone is genuinely, impossibly interesting. One of my favorite guest told me once: if you want to be fearless, you need a strong base. Otherwise you are just fearful.
He is right.
The vision alone doesn’t hold you up. The courage alone doesn’t hold you up. What holds you up is the people who believe in you while you build the thing nobody else can see yet — the ones who see it, the ones who execute it, and the ones who love you enough to say: stay. We do it your way.
With that base, you can be as fearless as the work requires.
And the work will require a great deal of it.
The guests from that first year never came back.
My “real” guests started arriving in year two — the ones who return now season after season, same room if they can get it. The first year was people stumbling onto us, impressed enough but not yet certain what they’d found. I didn’t have the words to explain it yet either. I was running on two hours of sleep and blind faith and the specific stubbornness of someone who has already told their father they’re not leaving.
They told me being a hotelier is glamorous. And in some sense it is — I do live here, inside this beauty, which is not nothing and which I do not take for granted. But nobody mentions the frigo bar that overheats at 2am. The decisions that feel enormous at the time and invisible to everyone else. The particular loneliness of seeing something nobody else can see yet and having to keep believing in it anyway, out loud, every day, until eventually it becomes what you always knew it was going to be.
It takes time. It takes the right people. It takes staying in an empty hotel until 11pm with all the lights on because you believe that this is the business you are going to run.
And then one day it is.
The lamp is still in the left corner.
Obviously.
Con affetto,
Anita
P.S. Gianluca still picks up the phone. Filippo is no longer in Jeddah. My dad now sits on the terrace in the evenings very proud. Some roots grow slowly. They hold the best.
P.P.S. That same year, Rudston from Maremma Safari walked past the garden and said: “Hi, I lead walking holidays and would love to bring people here.” I had a Margarita with Rudston yesterday. He still comes. So the problem was never about being a hiker — mostly it was about not getting the beauty of my lamp.
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