Hotel of the Week: Famed Rome Landmark Orient Express La Minerva Reopens After a Masterful Renovation
Conceived by Paris designer Hugo Toro, the hotel’s romantic interiors capture the allure of old-world grandeur with magnificent spaces at every turn
Overlooking Rome’s intimate cobbled Piazza della Minerva and its famous Bernini statue of an elephant topped by an ornate obelisk, the 93-room Orient Express La Minerva is the lush Baroque quintessence of a steamer-trunk vintage Italian grand hotel, right down to the potted palms in the atrium and a courtly concierge in a black jacket with a leonine mane of salt-and-pepper hair.
The hotel was originally built during the 17th-century as a private palazzo for the Fonsecas, a noble Portuguese family engaged in the port trade. In 1811, it was converted into a hotel and due to its central location, it became the preferred address of aristocrats, writers, and artists on the grand tour—everyone from Stendhal and Herman Melville to George Sand and Picasso.
After being bought by the Paris-based Accor hotel group, La Minerva has been given a much needed top-to-bottom renovation with a superb new interior by Franco-Mexican designer Hugo Toro whose studio is located in Paris.
It’s Toro’s nimble visual wit that makes La Minerva’s new look at once so resonantly historical and thrillingly original. Taking inspiration from sources like Los Angeles in the 1920s—hence the discreet Hollywood glamour of this place—as well as the tension between the sacred and the profane that’s at the heart of Baroque architecture and art in Rome, Toro created lounge-like rooms in schemes of terra-cotta, vanilla, topaz, Sienna red, olive, and bronze that are ideal for repose after the post-prandial afternoon siesta that a morning of busy sight-seeing requires.
Many of the pieces here are bespoke, like a pearl-gray velvet canape with leather belting, or the wrought-iron and amber-glass bedside sconces that show a fascinating intersection between Italian Baroque and Los Angeles’s Mexican and Spanish revival architecture. Beds are made up in linens by Rivolta Carmignani, a Milanese firm founded in 1867.
Suites come with record players and a selection of vinyl discs and baths feature red marble counters. Almost best of all, the hotel’s patrician patina survived intact, so that even if the lobby and bar have been modernized, guests still expect to hear the hooves of horse-drawn carriages clomping on the cobblestones outside rather than anything automotive as they settle in over a perfectly made Negroni.
Roman hotels are fierce when it comes to having the best rooftop amenities, and La Minerva is a hands-down winner, with views of the dome of the Pantheon and the spire of nearby Church of Sant Ivo della Sapienza, one of the handsomest Baroque churches in the city. Visitors will want to head here for breakfast or drinks with snacks. (The hotel does have a restaurant, Gigi, however there are many excellent old-fashioned trattoria in the neighborhood, notably Armando al Pantheon, which must be booked well in advance).
The hotel is also planning to build an on-site spa in the near future. In the meantime, it’s again one of the top addresses in Rome as a truly charming and very romantic destination.