You’ll notice it the moment you enter the lobby of Rome’s Two Key Hotel Vilòn. The carefully placed busts, the colorful figurines, the sparkling artworks and bold colors in every direction. It’s like this place was designed especially for the camera — and it more or less was. Owners of this gem in historic Rome hired Italian television and film set designer Paulo Bonfini to work on the bedrooms, and the rest of the hotel feels just as cinematic.
At Vilòn, chic, colorful spaces are designed to evoke the Art Deco elegance of Rome in the 50s and 60s. For us, it's a joyous supplement to Francis Ford Coppola’s own Palazzo Margherita, where every painstakingly chosen fabric and tablecloth brings you into the Coppola aesthetic.
And since a visit to either has us feeling an unbridled sense of the cinematic, our editorial team decided to choose 10 more Key hotels in Italy that feel like they might be tv or movie sets (in the case of San Domenico in Sicily — it was). Out of 146 Key hotels in Italy, these are our picks for the most fanciful design and impeccable attention to detail. The ones that make you feel like an actor on screen. The ones in their own cinematic universe.
San Domenico Palace, Taormina, A Four Seasons Hotel
TaorminaThe Sicilian town of Taormina is nothing if not spectacular, with the Ionian Sea at its feet and Mount Etna at its back. No less spectacular is San Domenico Palace, Taormina, A Four Seasons Hotel — first a 14th-century convent, later a 19th-century grand hotel, playing host to everyone from Oscar Wilde to Audrey Hepburn. And now, as a member of the Four Seasons family, it’s simply a top-flight luxury resort, made newly famous in America as the setting for the second season of The White Lotus.
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La Minervetta
SorrentoYou’ll find little in the way of greys or cream tones in La Minervetta’s twelve guest rooms. Rather than monochrome and minimal, they’re bright and sunny — literally, as they’re open to the light, with views through full-length windows over Sorrento, the Bay of Naples and Mount Vesuvius, and figuratively as well, clean-lined and decked out in vivid tones, anywhere from lime green and turquoise to simple, almost Nordic primary colors.
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Forestis Dolomites
BrixenBuilt of stone, glass, and wood both inside and out, this strikingly modern luxury lodge is beautifully integrated into a densely forested region of South Tyrol. The interior design makes the most of the location; guest rooms are bathed in natural light, thanks to picture windows that open onto views of the wilderness.
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Byblos Art Hotel Villa Amista
San Pietro in CarianoWe’ve seen design hotels, and we’ve seen fashion hotels, but the Byblos Art Hotel Villa Amistà is more than this: it’s also something like a museum, a showcase for a family’s impressive collection of 20th-century design objects and contemporary artworks, right down to the gallery-style placards in every room listing the pieces contained within.
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Maalot Roma
RomeDiscreetly tucked away inside a residential building right around the corner from the Trevi Fountain is Maalot Roma, a luxury hotel that frankly feels too luxe and glamorous to be as centrally located as it is. Within its walls you’ll find eclectic retro-inspired interiors and a manageable 30 rooms and suites — small enough to feel intimate but big enough for a bit of boutique-hotel buzz.
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Monaci delle Terre Nere
Zafferana EtneaPlenty of Sicilian hotels boast of their views of Mount Etna, but few can quite match the situation of Monaci delle Terre Nere. That’s not just any terre nere, after all — this black earth is the volcanic stuff, and it’s no wonder, since here you’re literally on the slopes, albeit the safe lower slopes, of Sicily’s most salient geographic feature. It’s a little bit baroque, a little bit rough-edged in classic Sicilian style, with a patina of exquisitely weathered stone, and ultimately it’s a contemporary mélange, weaving some subtle modern threads into its eclectic tapestry.
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Four Seasons Hotel Firenze
FlorenceIt’s a converted Renaissance-era palazzo, of course — well, not “of course,” but honestly, this is what a Florentine luxury hotel ought to be, right down to the frescoed ceilings. Imagine living like the Medicis did, but with less murderous intrigue and more satellite television channels; for underneath a layer of Renaissance opulence, the Four Seasons is as utterly modern a luxury hotel as you’ll find anywhere.
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Il Palazzo Experimental
VeniceThe Experimental Group has blossomed quickly from a word-of-mouth Parisian cocktail phenomenon to a full-fledged hospitality concern, with hotels in Paris, London, the Alps, and now Venice — and if there ever were a city whose hotel scene needed an infusion of youthful cool, it’s this one, whose bridges and canals are so thick with tourists you could be forgiven for wondering if there’s any nightlife culture here at all. That’s where Il Palazzo Experimental comes in, of course — not only does its bar, the Experimental Cocktail Club, answer that question in the affirmative, but as a hotel it turns the classic gestures of Venetian design into something fresh, contemporary, even sexy.
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Siena House
Torrita di SienaFor all their other charms, Italian hotels, as a rule, don’t really do understatement — so when you find a place that’s confident enough simply to call itself Siena House, it’s a good bet there’s something a bit special going on. (The proprietors are British, in fact, which goes a long way, now that we think of it, towards explaining the understatement.
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Velona's Jungle Luxury Suites
FlorenceIf we had a nickel for every pocket-sized jungle-themed luxury boutique hotel we’ve seen over the years, we’d have a grand total of five cents. Velona’s Jungle Luxury Suites is the only one of its kind, and much of that has to do with Velona himself. That’s Pasquale Velona, antique dealer and dear departed grandfather of the proprietor, Veronica Grechi — this hotel, just to the west of Florence’s busy city center, clearly contains generations’ worth of details.
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Top image: Hotel Vilòn
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