La dolce vita

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LADISPOLI, Italy -- Pell or Post? A choice should not be this difficult. So, consider both Il Pellicano and La Posta Vecchia.

Each hotel serves some of the best food on any coast in Italy, and the service and accommodations are excellent. Life is easy at both; life is good -- la dolce vita. La Posta Vecchia is near Ladispoli, north of Rome in the Lazio region. The villa once was owned by the late J. Paul Getty, and he lived there briefly. Mr. Getty's gardener, Raffaele Moretti, is still the gardener at La Posta Vecchia, raising vegetables, fruits and herbs on the estate for the kitchen of chef Michele Gioia. Mr. Gioia formerly worked with chef Antonio Guida at Il Pellicano, whose restaurant has been awarded a Michelin star.

This time of year, artichokes from the Posta Vecchia garden are young and perfect for Mr. Gioia's magic. He trims them, slices them fine, sautes them in olive oil and a hint of garlic and then adds white wine; this is served with barely cooked fava beans over ravioli filled with duck. Pasta doesn't get better than this, but it is also superb in Mr. Guida's kitchen to the north, where the fagottini ripieni -- stuffed little bundles -- are spectacular in his four-color pasta.

Imagine the pasta as a pound of butter, with each of the four sticks a different color, and all pressed together so that when the block of pasta is sliced there are four squares of colored pasta that form each fagottini, about the size of ravioli. The colors come from different ingredients: the familiar basic egg pasta; black pasta from squid ink; green from spinach, and orange from carrots.

After a filling is placed in the center of each slice, the four sides are sealed as the corners are pinched together on the top. Each side of the fagottini is a different color; only by looking down on them are all four colors visible.

The talent in both kitchens shows the heights Italian and international dishes reach in the hands of such artisans. The dishes are memorable, from suckling pig as tasty as it can be -- at both hotels -- to Mr. Gioia's perfection of ginger ice cream at La Posta Vecchia. The ice cream is worthy of its name, as beautiful in Italian as it is to the taste buds: gelato al zenzero.

La Posta Vecchia is close to Rome, about 25 minutes from the main international airport, Fiumicino; Il Pellicano is about 95 minutes from the airport. Along the highways between the hotels and Rome, tractor trailers on the autostrada -- like American Interstate highways -- are seen in late spring bringing loads of produce, including artichokes to markets in the capital and other destinations.

The hotels are near SS1, a strada statale, or secondary highway, which is also called Via Aurelia after the Roman road built about 240 B.C. to connect the city with France. The autostrada parallels much of Via Aurelia near the Tyrrhenian coast.

La Posta Vecchia and Il Pellicano are on the Tyrrhenian Sea -- part of the Mediterranean -- so called after an ancient name for the Etruscans, predecessors of the Romans. The sea extends north to the Ligurian Sea, west to Corsica and Sardinia and south to Sicily, meeting the Ionian Sea at the Strait of Messina. The Tyrrhenian's east coast is along the Italian peninsula.

The two hotels are different in size, layout, surroundings and appeal. Think of La Posta Vecchia as a villa, a private home where one is a guest of the family.