Natale Rusconi: Creating His Own Hotel Legacy

By Derek Gale, Senior Associate Editor -- Hotels, 11/1/2007

For many of the great independent hoteliers, the story is the same—they are born to hotelier parents and reared in hotels. So it goes with Dr. Natale Rusconi, widely acknowledged as one of the world’s greatest hotelkeepers.

But his story is no ordinary tale of a family-run hotel legacy, because after five years of working in his parents’ hotel in Milan, Italy, he quit.

“I couldn’t stand it anymore,” he says. “My mother was very difficult. We learn from the errors of our teachers, our parents.”

Rusconi indeed learned by working for his parents, but his decision to leave would take him back to The Savoy Hotel in London, a place he credits as the institution where he learned to be a hotelier.

It was there that he went from the behind-thescenes work of listing names and refilling fountain pens to No. 1 at reception, and it was there that he had previously learned his way around a restaurant and a kitchen, during a stint as a trainee.

Those experiences in a luxury hotel would prove invaluable to him later in life, when he came to oversee a luxury hotel in Venice known as the Cipriani.

And no doubt it is his 30 years of distinguished service at that property—including his ability to inspire the staff, to envision and carry out upgrades to the physical structure, and to bring out the best in Italian food and beverage—that has led his colleagues to select Dr. Natale Rusconi as HOTELS’ 2007 Independent Hotelier of the World.

Learning Languages

Rusconi’s grandfather on his mother’s side was the catalyst for his family’s entrée into the hotel business—he made his living buying old buildings and transforming them into hotels. His last project, the Hotel Argentina in Milan, was left to his daughter—Rusconi’s mother—who was just a teenager. Because she couldn’t manage it, she and her mother rented the hotel to a group of men, one of whom would eventually buy out his partners, marry Rusconi’s mother, and run the hotel with her.

Rusconi was born there, at the hotel in Milan, in 1926, and grew up under the supervision of a nanny because his mother was busy working in the hotel. He was sent to the Swiss School, where he learned German at a young age, because his hotelier parents wanted a son who spoke languages.

To further Rusconi’s German skills, his parents sent him away to Bern, Switzerland, through the secretary manager of the hotel, who had a brother there with children around the age of Rusconi. So during the summer, “Instead of going to the beach like the other children, I was sent to Bern to practice my German,” Rusconi remembers.

Another part of growing up in a hotel was being in constant contact with various staffers. “We had a very good cook in Milan,” Rusconi recalls, “and I competed with [him]. It was quite amusing at my age of 9, 10 or 11, both of us doing a risotto—he was doing it his own very good and sophisticated way; I was doing it the way my grandmother had taught me.”

And yet despite his language study and practice in the kitchen, Rusconi’s parents did not think he would become a hotelier, because he was very shy as a boy. Instead, they encouraged him to continue studying and to get a university degree, which he later earned in Latin literature and history.

Beginning A Career

After earning his doctorate, Rusconi still had to choose what to do with his life, and it was then that he decided to be a hotelier. He accepted a stage at the Savoy, where he worked for a year in all of the departments, from the kitchen to the reception desk to the public relations office. After this he went back to Milan, because his mother told him the family’s hotel would become his eventually, and said he needed to work with her. He did so for five years—handling the hotel’s correspondence and parts of the food and beverage operations, and helping transform the hotel from third-class to second-class—until 1959, when he got fed up and decided to quit.

“I wrote to London, where I had been as a trainee (in 1954), and they said ‘Of course if you’d like to come, we’d be delighted,’ and I ended up being accepted as a receptionist at the Savoy Hotel,” Rusconi recalls. “I arrived and they told me, ‘Mr. Rusconi, you were probably treated too well as a trainee, now you are No. 3 at reception. You don’t appear in front of the clients.’”

Through hard work, Rusconi rose to No. 1 at reception in a matter of months. But his father suggested that he return to Italy. So back Rusconi went, and after a short time in Sicily, ended up in Milan, where he got a job as the general manager of the Hotel Piano, where the owner was a friend of his father and grandfather.

“I started to work with him, and he said, ‘Natalino, you are going to be my general manager, but between you and me, I am going to supervise the hotel, you are only going to take care of the restaurant.’ It was an impossible situation. So there again I didn’t stay—I decided to quit.”

Rusconi wanted nothing more that to run his own hotel, but his mother had sold the management of the family’s hotel in Milan, so he accepted a position at the head office of CIGA Hotels S.p.A. in Venice in 1960, at a time when that company was expanding.

After “suffering” there for three years, Rusconi was able to transition into one of CIGA’s hotels, the Gritti Palace, as resident manager, in 1963. He was there five years, where he built key relationships and truly learned to be a manager. Eventually Rusconi would become general manager there, but not before a stint in Naples as joint general manager of the Excelsior, and another in Rome as general manager of the Grand Hotel.

Company, Hotel In Shambles

CIGA Hotels was sold in 1969, a year after Rusconi had gone to the Grand Hotel. He did not like the new management, and in late 1972 was transferred “in disgrace” back to the Gritti Palace as general manager. The staff there was happy to see him, and he stayed for another few years, working 15-hour days, honing his skills, until CIGA management transferred him to Paris in 1976 to be the general manager of three newly purchased hotels: the Grand Hotel and Café de Paris, the Prince de Galles, and the Meurice.

Rusconi was there only briefly, until CIGA management, falling on tough times, sold the hotels in 1977. “I then had to go back to the head office,” Rusconi remembers. “I didn’t like it because I had lost my management of the Gritti. And so I tried to find another job.”

That next job would be his last—as managing director of the Cipriani. Rusconi was fortunate that his neighbor in Venice happened to be the administration manager of the hotel, which had just been purchased by Jim Sherwood on behalf of Sea Containers Ltd. His neighbor suggested Rusconi meet Sherwood, and shortly after Rusconi was offered the job of managing director of the hotel.

The newly purchased property had not seen any investment for about five years, and was “really in shambles” when Rusconi took the helm. But thanks to the ongoing investment of Sea Containers (a subsidiary of which would later become Orient- Express Hotels Ltd.) and the devoted leadership of Rusconi, the off-the-beaten-path property would grow increasingly elegant and more and more famous, eventually becoming the No. 1 hotel in Venice and one of the top hotels in Italy.

“Natale’s gracious style and unparalleled skills in hotel management at the very highest level have made his name, and that of the Hotel Cipriani, famous around the world,” notes Adrian Constant, former vice president, European hotel operations and development for Orient-Express Hotels.

30 Years Of Service

Early on in his tenure as managing director, Rusconi also was charged with finding other properties for Sea Containers’ expanding hotel business, which he did in the Villa San Michele in Florence and the Hotel Splendido in Portofino. After that, he served for a while as the area manager of these three Italian hotels, but mostly, he devoted himself to the Cipriani, “sometimes even too much,” he says.

His hours were long as he had a hand in everything— checking which rooms were assigned to which arrivals, overseeing important banquets, greeting and corresponding with VIPs, and solving any immediate problems while also trying to plan for the future. “Fortunately I had a wonderful wife who always followed me with patience,” Rusconi notes. “Hoteliers in the world now, if they want to be real hoteliers, have to have a patient wife.”

Rusconi has continued this routine of working hard in recent years, often putting in 12-hour days. But meanwhile, the world around him has changed, with technology becoming somewhat overwhelming to this old-fashioned luxury hotelkeeper who prefers not to use a computer.

And with managing global distribution systems perhaps as important these days as spending time with guests, “I don’t feel like belonging to that,” he says. Plus, Rusconi notes, he is finally at the point where he can no longer ignore his advancing age (he is 81). So at the end of the year, the legendary hotelier will retire, and Maurizio Saccani, who started his Orient-Express Hotels career with Rusconi back in 1978 as food and beverage manager at the Cipriani, will take over the management of the hotel as part of his new role as managing director, Italy, for Orient-Express Hotels.

Thoughts On The Future

Although Rusconi hails the man who hired him, former Sea Containers chief Jim Sherwood, as the visionary behind what would become the very successful Orient-Express Hotels, he also has high praise for Paul White, the new CEO. “He is going to bring quite a lot of good things to the company, because he’s modern, he’s contemporary, but he wants to listen to people,” Rusconi says. “And he is already delegating power to those around him.”

Rusconi refers to the company’s recent management restructuring, through which White has created a vice president of operations, a dedicated development team, and vice presidents of design, sales and marketing, and corporate communications. Rusconi has been named a vice president as well, with the hope that he will stay on in an advisory role. “They told me, ‘You have to remain as a consultant,’” Rusconi says. “We’ll see.”

One gets the feeling that at 81, Rusconi may prefer to spend his retirement with his family. He talks of going with his wife, Connie, to their house in the lake district north of Milan more frequently, and also mentions visiting his one of his two daughters in London. And there is no doubt he will keep close tabs on his son, Pietro, who is executive assistant to the general manager at the Hilton Molino Stucky in Venice, and who spent two years getting some of the best training available in the industry—with his father at the Cipriani.