FRANCOS: TEN YEARS, FIVE COLOURS

Le Sirenuse’s arbiter of style, Franco Sersale, passed away in January 2015 at the age of 87 while doing what he most loved – travelling. In his final months, he had become involved in the family’s discussions about how to turn that car park into an elegant al fresco bar. It was Franco who solved the problem of how not to block the famous view of sea, Li Galli islands, mother church and Positano’s near-vertical stack of houses, while providing the secure height necessary for a retaining wall at the end of the seating area. Two sweeping masonry curves would dip down like ropes hanging from a central column, and in the space thus created, two straight-edged glass panels would be inserted. Franco shared this inspired suggestion in typical offhand fashion, as if it had been obvious all along.

After Franco passed, his son Antonio became all the more determined to finish the bar his father had helped him plan – and to make it a tribute to a man who, more than any other, had made Le Sirenuse beautiful inside and out.

Franco not only assembled a collection of exquisite antiques and artworks with an aristocratic southern Italian flavour – but with his unerring taste and eye, he also knew exactly where to place them. He worked with local artisans like ceramicists Fornace De Martino to restore Le Sirenuse’s original tiles and produce new ones based on motifs he personally devised. A lover of fine wines, he created the hotel’s first dedicated paean to wine and cocktail culture, the Champagne Bar, in 1991, adorning it with some stylish wicker furniture from Milan-based design firm Gervasoni, which can still be admired in the bar’s current-day successor, Aldo’s.

Today, Francos has become a Positano phenomenon, an Instagram imperative, a bucket list baseline. But the impulse and thought process behind its creation is still as fresh as it was when it was still a work in progress in the spring and early summer of 2015. It would celebrate beauty and good taste, it would champion art and artisanship, it would become a beacon of that very Franco-esque brand of connoisseurship that values attention to detail in everything from the perfect salted almond snack to an old master painting.

One of the most striking aspects of Francos is its chromatic purity. The bar is a Pantone chart come to life, in which a series of striking Mediterranean colours join hands in a vibrant dance. If Francos had a flag, these would be its five colours:

YELLOW

Sculptor Giuseppe Ducrot calls the bracing, acidic hue of his magnificently fluid fountain “Selenium Yellow”. It has so much attitude and so much vibrant presence, we wouldn’t be surprised if you could see it from space. It’s answered by the radiant, fresh shadow of the lemons on the tree in the centre of the seating area, and by the deep, translucent yellow of our popular Positano Sling cocktail.

GREEN

Greenery is everywhere at Francos, just as it it at Le Sirenuse: in the agave and cactus plants that shoot skywards like rockets from terracotta planters atop the wall columns, in the dense foliage of the bush roses that draw a ragged line beneath one of Positano’s most celebrated views, in the dark, cool green of the bar’s central lemon tree. In this part of Italy, yellow and blue literally make green, as sun and rain collaborate to nurture the coast’s forests, kitchen gardens and verdant terraces.

WHITE

Francos’ pearly white floor tiles were created exclusively for Le Sirenuse by centuries-old Salerno ceramics firm Fornace De Martino, which Franco Sersale first contacted in the 1990s to help him reproduce some of Le Sirenuse’s worn antique tiles. In order to create the iridescent effect, the tiles were fired at extremely high temperatures in the firm’s ancient kilns. It was a high-risk process: ten degrees hotter, and the terracotta base of the tiles would have started to melt. Their hue is reflected in the bar’s whitewashed walls, which are repainted each winter just like those of the hotel, in the gentle white of the roses that cluster beneath the seaward parapet and climb the fountain wall, and in the white lime wash painted around the base of the lemon tree’s trunk – a traditional Amalfi Coast protection against plant diseases.