The Most Enchanting Hotels to Book in Rome
These 12 stays prove that when it comes to hospitality, the Eternal City has finally caught up to its own myth
For decades, the conversation about design hotels in Italy was a Milan-and-Florence conversation, occasionally a Venice conversation, almost never a Rome one. The Romans invented the hospitium, the cauponae and the imperial bathhouse—the template every luxury spa is still copying—and laid out the first city in human history where an emperor, a Greek philosopher, and a Phoenician merchant could all find dignified lodging within walking distance of the Forum. Then the empire fell, the pilgrims arrived, and for the next millennium and a half, the city’s accommodations were classified by which saint’s relic they sat closest to.
The 20th century brought the grandes dames, most of them clustered on Via Veneto and the Spanish Steps, and most of them coasting on Hollywood. The 21st finally brought the architects. The capital that produced the Pantheon’s coffered ceiling, Borromini’s optical-illusion cloisters, Bernini’s elephants, and Caravaggio’s chiaroscuro had, until roughly 2023, almost no hotel that took that inheritance seriously as a brief. Now it has more than a dozen. The properties below include one built into Fascist-era palazzo commissioned for Augustus’s 2,000th birthday, a Borromini convent with nuns’ cells intact, a 16th-century cardinals’ college restored by film directors and a former cabinet office wrapped in glass floors that reveals 1st-century Roman workshops underneath. They share an inheritance no other capital can match and a willingness, finally, to build into it rather than around it.
1. ROMEO Roma
Zaha Hadid Architects spent more than a decade restoring Palazzo Capponi on Via di Ripetta, a 16th-century Tridente block between Piazza del Popolo and the Mausoleum of Augustus, whose walls hid a 1st-century Roman bottega the excavators uncovered mid-build. Project director Paola Cattarin opened end of November 2024 as one of the last projects Hadid personally led before she died in 2016, and the firm threaded its parametric vernacular through the protected masonry by building a second internal skin that floats inside the original shell. The swimming pool’s glazed floor doubles as the ceiling of the recovered workshop, now an open gallery. Alfredo Romeo’s personal collection runs through the 56 rooms and 18 suites—Mario Schifano, Mimmo Paladino, Francesco Clemente—and Alain Ducasse’s first Rome restaurant operates downstairs under chef Iacopo Iualè.
2. Bulgari Hotel Roma
The Roman jewelry house took 19 years and eight global openings to come home, finally landing on Piazza Augusto Imperatore on June 9, 2023. Antonio Citterio and Patricia Viel handled the building, a 1936-38 rationalist palazzo by Vittorio Ballio Morpurgo built around the Mussolini regime’s 1937 staging of Augustus’s 2,000th birthday. Ferruccio Ferrazzi’s original facade mosaic survives. Inside, ACPV layered Pentelic marble, travertine, Murano glass and a Rubelli tapestry program against Niko Romito’s two restaurants and Italy’s first Bulgari Dolci. This summer brings Bulgari’s L’Estate Italiana program here—a Pier Daniele Seu pizza bar pop-up and a Niko Romito gelato cart parked across the open-air terraces.
3. Six Senses Rome
Patricia Urquiola converted Palazzo Salviati Cesi Mellini—a 15th-century block on Piazza di San Marcello reimagined in the 18th century by Tomaso De Marchis—into Six Senses’ first urban hotel in 2023, taking the city’s first LEED Gold luxury hotel certification along the way. The material palette is restricted to cocciopesto, travertine, Palladiana, and Margraf stones and local Roman travertine. This Urquiola self-imposed brief happens to align with what the Soprintendenza tends to allow. A glass floor in the BIVIUM lobby exposes a 4th-century baptismal bath; downstairs, a Roman-baths spa circuit moves through caldarium, tepidarium, frigidarium, and snow room. The owner also funded the restoration of the San Marcello al Corso church facade next door.
4. Palazzo Talìa
Award-winning director Luca Guadagnino designed his first hotel while simultaneously shooting Queer and After the Hunt at Rome’s Cinecittà studios: the 16th-century Nobile Collegio del Nazareno on Largo del Nazareno—a Renaissance college founded by Cardinal Tonti in 1622—as a 26-key boutique, working with Mia Home Design Gallery and Laura Feroldi Studio. In the 2,670-square-foot Talìa Suite, you’ll find Gaspare Serenari’s restored 18th-century frescoes; the Aula Magna ceiling is the fresco that gave the hotel its name. Guest room walls hang prints from the Elisabetta Catalano archive. A 1940s Napoleone Martinuzzi chandelier anchors the entrance, with Micheluzzi wall sconces threading through the suites.
5. Rocco Forte Hotel de Russie
Giuseppe Valadier’s 1814 noble residence opened as a hotel in 1901, drew enough Russian luminaries—Stravinsky, Diaghilev—to take its name from them, and served as RAI national broadcasting’s postwar headquarters before Rocco Forte reopened it in 2000 under Tommaso Ziffer and Olga Polizzi. In 2024, Paolo Moschino and Philip Vergeylen of Paolo Moschino Studio reimagined the Stravinskij Bar, with a Salvatore Calabrese cocktail program whose Stravinskij Spritz menu nods to The Rite of Spring. Gio Bressana’s 2021 fresco commission—parrots, butterflies, strawberry bushes, and citrus trees—wraps Le Jardin de Russie.
6. Hotel Eden
The 1889 Ludovisi landmark has belonged to the Dorchester Collection since 2013 and was last reimagined in 2017 by Bruno Moinard and Claire Bétaille of 4BI & Associés, with restaurants and spa by Patrick Jouin and Sanjit Manku. The 2024–25 news is the kitchen. Salvatore Bianco arrived from Naples to take over La Terrazza in 2024 and reclaimed the rooftop’s Michelin star in 2025, with the panorama now rivaling the one from Trinità dei Monti up the hill. The same year, the hotel launched Eden Home, a porcelain collaboration with Roman ceramicist Coralla Maiuri, whose pieces now appear on every table and in the gift shop. Gio Bressana’s lobby frescoes anchor the public rooms. 98 keys, including the 2,174-square-foot Bellavista Penthouse Suite, its wraparound floor-to-ceiling windows facing the Quirinale and St. Peter’s.
7. Hassler Roma
The grande dame at the top of the Spanish Steps reopened in spring 2026, after the first full refurbishment in its 133-year history. Roberto E. Wirth—the deaf hotelier who ran the property for four decades until his death in 2022—left it to his children, Roberto Jr. and Veruschka Bucher Wirth, who ran the renovation in-house, leaning into Astrid Schiller Wirth’s design lineage. The bigger reveal arrives late 2026: a roughly 8,600-square-foot subterranean spa being excavated directly beneath the Spanish Steps, among the largest underground wellness build in the centro. Imàgo holds one Michelin star under Andrea Antonini and offers a view across every rooftop south of the Pincio.
8. Casa Monti
Laura Gonzalez opened her first Rome hotel in summer 2024, taking an 18th-century palazzo on Via Panisperna—formerly a police station, more usefully on the edge of Monti’s antiques district—and threading it with the Paris designer’s signature collision of plaster busts, hand-painted wallpaper, and unrepentant maximalism. The 36-key boutique is currently hosting the McGregor Art Suite, a six-month residency running April 15 through Oct. 15, 2026, in which Los Angeles– and Athens-based painter Michael McGregor has transformed Suite 203 into a livable artwork: custom textiles, ceramics, painted wall panels, and a limited-edition ROMA AMOR sketchbook, all available to purchase before checkout. A parallel photography exhibition by Manfredi Gioacchini titled “Grand Tour” runs throughout the year.
9. Orient Express La Minerva
The debut Orient Express hotel opened in 2025 on Piazza della Minerva, just behind the Pantheon, with French-Mexican designer Hugo Toro on the interiors. Bernini’s elephant carrying its Egyptian obelisk has anchored the piazza since 1667—a setting the Accor- and LVMH-backed launch inherited rather than engineered. Toro’s vocabulary of geometric marquetry, terracotta, and custom brass threads through 93 keys arranged around Palazzo Fonseca, the 1620 residence of the aristocratic Portuguese Fonseca family, converted to a hotel in 1811. Up top, Paris Society’s restaurant Gigi Rigolatto Roma faces the back of the Pantheon; below, a basement spa cuts beneath two millennia of Roman foundation work.
10. Hotel Palazzo Manfredi
A 17th-century palazzo on Via Labicana—originally a Guidi hunting lodge—sits directly across from the Colosseum, atop the bones of the Ludus Magnus, the gladiator training ground where the gladiator training ground built by Domitian for the men who fought next door. Matteo Thun designed the travertine-mesh facade of the recent Grand View and Ludus Magnus suite annex, threading a contemporary screen across the historic block. Giorgia Dennerlein of Loto AD Project handled the interiors. Aroma, the rooftop restaurant under chef Giuseppe Di Iorio, might be the only Roman fine-dining room with the Colosseum at eye level.
11. Fendi Private Suites
The third floor of Palazzo Fendi once served as the residence of the noble Boncompagni-Ludovisi family before becoming home to Karl Lagerfeld’s photography archives. Fendi took occupancy of the palazzo in 2004, then unveiled the renovated flagship boutique and seven-suite hotel together in 2016 as the world’s first Fendi hotel. Interiors are by Marco Costanzi, with the Palazzo Privé apartment designed by Dimore Studio’s Emiliano Salci and Britt Moran. Lepanto marble doorways open onto restrained neutral suites lined with Lagerfeld black-and-whites and bespoke Fendi Casa furnishings. Breakfast arrives in bed or on the rooftop terrace, which also houses the Roman outpost of Zuma, Rainer Becker’s robata operation, now well into its second decade above the boutique.
12. Chapter Roma
South African designer Tristan Du Plessis of Studio A converted a 19th-century block on Via di Santa Maria de’ Calderari into a 42-key boutique in the Regola district, a few minutes from the Jewish Ghetto and the Tiber. Opened in 2019, refreshed continuously, and the most art-credentialed boutique on the list by named-artist count: bespoke commissions from Willy Verginer, Alice Pasquini, Cyrcle, Drew Merritt and Warios run through the public rooms. Campocori, the in-house restaurant Du Plessis also designed, plays New York-Italian-1930s and remains one of the harder reservations south of the Pantheon.