- The property, named Palazzo Talia, sits on the former site of Rome’s 16th-century Collegio Nazareno.
- Inside, guests can choose between 26 rooms — including the eponymous Talìa suite — in addition to a signature bar, restaurant, & spa.
- Bookings are currently available, starting at a nightly “Grand Opening” rate of €565 (AU$935).
Luca Guadagnino, the Italian-Algerian auteur behind such steamy films as Call Me By Your Name and A Bigger Splash, is now officially getting into the hotel game.
A creative force of famously chameleonic taste, Guadagnino was already well-known — outside of his de facto art form of cinema — for working with Italian fashion houses Fendi and Salvatore Ferragamo.
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Yet his first foray into luxury hospitality, dubbed Palazzo Talia, is a properly new manoeuvre: employing a range of disciplines that, until recently, you’d had have to be a movie star, in the mould of Swinton or Chalamet, to witness in action.
Working alongside the team at his eponymous architectural studio, Guadagnino’s goal was to transform the site on which Palazzo Talia now sits — home, until 1999, to the charitable scholastic order known as the Collegio Nazareno — into “intimate” lodgings with a maximalist aesthetic.
“If you come to Rome, a hotel like this, you want to diffuse yourself in beauty, comfort and sadness,” says Guadagnino (via Financial Times). “For me, everything needed to exude that pleasure.”
The Italian director’s dogged pursuit of the P word has proven successful: particularly in the common areas of the hotel, where the Collegio’s late-renaissance canvas is injected with warm, lived-in detail.
In the reception area, visible from across the cobblestone streets, Guadagnino has placed a three-metre-long chandelier (crafted by Venetian artist Napoleone Martinuzzi) along with a sofa reupholstered in Dedar fabric.
Like virtually everything else in this universe, both objects were custom-built for Palazzo Talia and speak to Guadagnino’s desire for aesthetic contemporaneity.
“We didn’t want to deny the presence of the Collegio,” he observes. “In Rome, I find there’s sometimes still a resistance to the idea of dialogue with the contemporary.”
The hotel’s modern aspect, which shall be crucial in securing the patronage of well-heeled Roman locals, feels most alive in the hotel’s elegantly informal F&B spaces. At Tramae Restaurant, Executive Chef Marco Coppola invites diners on a “culinary Grand Tour of Italy,” supplemented by the usual handful of international morsels.
A fiendish amount of the main dining room is taken up by banquette seating, emptying into the hotel’s central courtyard. That area is shared with patrons of the hotel’s “small, elegant treasure chest” of a bar, Della Musa.
Offering a range of classic Italian drinks and signature cocktails in an intimate, nook-like setting; Della Musa clearly illustrates, once again, how Guadagnino’s team are tackling the task of redefining august old spaces.
Decorative stucco portals sit alongside lava-stone tabletops (commissioned from Made a Mano) and overhead, every fiddly detail is eclipsed by Grotesque ceiling murals — a reminder of the building’s storied, patrician origin.
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“It’s a great place to find a wife,” observes Guadagnino somewhat drolly. And if not your soul mate: surely, at least two other like-minded travellers game enough to re-enact Challengers.
Who could resist a vibe this palatial?
