Hotel San Anselmo, Rome, Italy

If you’re booking a break in the Eternal City and yearn for peace, quiet and romance, the Hotel San Anselmo is the best boutique hotel in Rome for you. It’s tucked away in a leafy residential area on Aventine Hill full of palatial villas and embassies painted that distinctive, rusty orange so typical of Rome. At the luxury hotels in the historical centre, chances are you’ll wake to the sound of scooters, sirens and car horns. At the Hotel San Anselmo you get a dawn chorus of birdsong and the scent of orange blossom and oleander.

The facilities

Housed in a 19th-century villa, the Hotel San Anselmo is a sophisticated and elegant urban retreat for an exclusive clientele. The opulent interiors fuse Italian baroque with contemporary style. In the mornings, guests graze on a fresh buffet breakfast in a bright, mirrored salon. And in the evenings, the cosy bar dispenses pre-dinner aperitivi which can be enjoyed on the terrace or under the rose-covered pergola in the little fragrant garden.

The Hotel San Anselmo may not be bang in the centre of Rome, but all its best bits are easily accessible. The restaurants of Trastevere, the bars of Testaccio and the Forum are a fifteen- to twenty-minute walk away. If you’re exhausted from the cultural steeple-chase of Rome, Piramide metro stop is nearby and the Aventine Hill is also well serviced by local buses.

The rooms

In the style of a bona fide boutique hotel, the 34 rooms at the Hotel San Anselmo have been individually-designed and given a name, not a number. Canopied beds, antique furnishings and artistic touches like poetry scrawled on walls add a dash of historical decadence. Generous bathrooms clad in Bisazza mosaic tiles all have power-showers and some have Jacuzzi baths. The best are the Loggia Imperiale (812), the Golden Room (830) and the Camera con Vista (829) which has its own private patio.