Hidden away on Rome’s prestigious Via del Corso lies Palazzo Roma, the latest addition to the city’s luxury hotel scene from Milan-based designer Giampiero Panepinto. Despite joining sister properties Hotel Maalot, Hotel Vilon, and the equally regal Palazzo Vilon, the Palazzo Roma project proved that building from the ground up in the Eternal City is getting more and more challenging.
The Shedir Collection, the savvy conglomerate and the brains behind the hotel, proposes restoring and upcycling as an ingenious solution to combat ancient Roman planning permissions.
Heritage meets contemporary luxury at Palazzo Roma
Like the group’s other hotels, Palazzo Roma focuses on ‘restoration over cultivation’, as general manager Rosario Rubino tells Wallpaper*. The construction method essentially entailed ‘building on top of another layer of history’ in the former regal palazzi of Rome’s former hedonistic empire to make a ‘lifestyle hotel that allows guests to experience the emotions of Rome in a new way’.
The aim was to redefine and reinterpret the building’s sense of place to inflict an even greater sense of history. ‘The starting point was to create a poetic relationship between past and present, between nostalgia and reality, recollection and imagination,’ Milan-based interior designer and maestro of the project, Giampiero Panepinto, tells me.
‘The property evokes the story of a noble Roman family that opens the doors of its home to guests. I tried to revive the atmosphere once breathed in the sumptuous rooms through art, music, literature and cinema, environments that retrace the chronicles and reports of the illustrious Rome.’
The result is something soulful and intimate. More verging on a museum than a home, Palazzo Roma features original frescoes, coffered ceilings, Versailles teak parquet flooring, and precisely 20 different marbles to conjure a sense of ‘value, elegance and unique Italian design’.
‘I wanted to tell the story of Rome in its entirety. Each piece brings its own experience, intersecting perfectly with each other, giving life to a precious and majestic work,’ he adds. And, truthfully, this notion gets materialised throughout – from infinite art pieces, frescoes and stuccoes, plaster casts and boiserie, to gilded ceilings restored by skilled artisans across Italy.
The Venetian-style flooring gives way to an array of nuances and shades that lurk into the large corridors that transform into a Wunderkammer, a backdrop to a collection of ancient portraits, photographs and art installations, all handpicked from vintage markets, and lots locally and beyond. The goal, as Panepinto notes, is to ‘merge past and present’, which ultimately ‘gives life to a unique contemporary Roman way of living’.
This attention to fluid luxe details flows across the hotel’s 39 rooms and suites. Each has its own floor plan, uniquely decorated in a varying palette of deep greens, reds, yellows and golds, alongside intarsia wood on the first-floor ceilings and fabric wallpapers on the second and third floors.
More eccentric digs come courtesy of the so-called Ladies’ Suite, which has nods to some of the most influential women figures of the last century, from the late Diana, Princess of Wales, to Madonna, Angela Merkel and Minnie Mouse.
Elsewhere, the Sala della Musica (The Music Room) is a vision of grand pianos, statues – in particular, the grand Euterpe, the goddess of music in the centre – and the eclectic Sala degli Orologi (the Watches Room) spearheaded by a mammoth collection of 150 watches decorated about the place.
The knockout centrepiece of the palazzo comes courtesy of the Cherubini Restaurant – think breathtaking floor-to-ceiling frescoes adorning the walls and mammoth mighty crystal chandeliers. Meanwhile, executive chef Federico Sartucci's menu matches the surroundings with Romano cuisine inspired by the city and the chef’s extensive travels across the globe.
