BritBox UK has announced that period drama Hotel Portofino will launch on the service on 27th January 2022 ahead of a 2023 transmission on ITV.
Starring Natasha McElhone, the show follows a British family who open a hotel for upper class travellers on the magical Italian Riviera during the ‘Roaring 20s’.
The Hotel has only been open a few weeks, but the guests including the imperious Lady Latchmere (Anna Chancellor), are already proving hard-to-please.
Bella Ainsworth (McElhone) the co-proprietor and moving spirit behind the hotel, quickly finds herself being targeted by a scheming local politician, Signor Danioni (Pasquale Esposito), who threatens to drag her into the red-hot political cauldron of Mussolini’s Italy.
The Hotel demands all of Bella’s resources, energy, and focus, but she’s being pulled in other directions, as she tries to coax wounded son Lucian, and her widowed daughter, Alice, towards health and happiness in the traumatic aftermath of World War 1.
Then there’s Bella’s aristocratic but caddish husband, Cecil (Mark Umbers), who’s obsessed with arranging an advantageous marriage for Lucian to secure the future of the Ainsworth family’s estate back in England, and with finding the money to pay for his dilettante lifestyle.
The series was created and written by Matt Baker.