Casa Botticelli in San Felice

Hardly a hotel at all, Casa Botticelli in San Felice is a nine-room boutique in the heart of Florence. And while it’s practically negligible compared to the scale of the local tourist industry, it looms large — or should — in the mind of anyone who wants a hotel stay to show them a unique perspective on a familiar destination. Casa Botticelli accomplishes this not just on the merits of what’s inside its walls — it does that too, and we’ll return to the topic — but on the merits of its location, in what the hoteliers consider to be Florence’s coolest neighborhood.

The neighborhood in question is Santo Spirito, named for the nearest church, and it’s a corner of the Oltrarno district, more or less straight across the Santa Trìnita bridge from the tightly packed streets of Florence’s old city center. This means that even if Santo Spirito weren’t full of charming shops and interesting nightlife, it’d still be a fantastic location based on its easy access to — and escape from — the city’s main attractions (and most heavily traveled neighborhoods).

After that, to find that Casa Botticelli is a well-crafted, fully realized, tiny little gem of a hotel — it’s almost too good to be true. It’s an art gallery as well as a hotel, with many of its works offered for sale, and in terms of design it’s a fine example of the contemporary Florentine style, which unapologetically mixes elements from the fifteenth century straight up to the present day. If there’s a down side at all, it’s that you might find it hard to return home without entertaining thoughts of relocating to this most picturesque of cities....