Luxury Hotels in Rome by Lee Marshall
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Crossing Condotti
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Rome may not be the easiest city for budget travellers, but at the top end of the market, things are humming. The Eternal City now has two of the most luxurious hotel suites in Italy - both inaugurated within a few weeks of each other in the spring of 1999. Since their respective top-end suites were opened, The Excelsior in Via Veneto, and the Eden - just around the corner in Via Ludovisi - have been engaged in a tit-for-tat War of the Suites, with big names such as the Sultan of Brunei, Madonna, George Bush Junior and Michelle Pfeiffer being nonchalantly dropped to the press as real or potential clients.
The Excelsior's Villa La Cupola suite is certainly impressive. Situated in the top corner of the hotel, underneath the Belle Epoque dome which gives the suite its name, it was designed by American architect Michael Stelea, and is inspired by Roman palaces and villas such as Palazzo Borghese. The green marble in the bathrooms comes from ancient quarries in Tunisia and Italy, the chandeliers are not just Murano - they’re gilded Murano - and the floors have elegant Cosmatesque tiles.
But these details seem positively restrained when one enters the main living room, right underneath the dome, which has been frescoed in a sort of Ancient Roman Rococo style - Nero meets Tiepolo - with a series of allegories in which Atlas is supposed to represent television and Hermes becomes the god of marketing. The same fusion is evident throughout the suite: giant TV screens pop out of eighteenth-century cabinets, and the “Pompeian-style” panoramic jacuzzi on the top floor - served, of course, by an internal lift - stands next to a private eight-seater cinema and a gym bristling with workout machines. Oh, and the dining room, with its mosaic-inlay table, has a temperature-controlled wine cabinet with 160 bottles to choose from at prices ranging from $200 to $2,000. The suite took eight months to fit out, at a cost of six billion lire (a little over £2 million).
Over at the Eden, though, they scoff at the Villa La Cupola. In Via Ludovisi, the Eden is set back from the dolce vita (for which read: cars and buses) of the Via Veneto. It has always sold itself as Rome’s most exclusive luxury hotel (“we don’t give discounts”), and their own “suite to end all suites” - the Ambassador’s Floor, is reassuringly restrained and reassuringly expensive. Similarly, the Ambassador’s Floor is in fact made up of five interconnecting suites plus a salon, board room, fitness centre and sixth-floor panoramic dining room, reached by another of those internal lifts. Only those with the largest of budgets, entourages and/or egos will want the whole thing.
If the keyword at the Excelsior is opulence, the Eden is selling elegance with security. Their mega-suite may only be on the first floor - but those windows are made of bulletproof glass, and there is an internal closed-circuit TV system. Patrizia Ciotti, the hotel’s head of communications, still remembers the day when the hotel was brought close to the point of collapse by the simultaneous presence of George Bush Junior, the mayor of Palermo and the president of Zaire. “All those G-men on the staircases were making the other guests nervous”, she says, “not to mention each other”.
The Ambassador’s Floor is designed to host heads of state, company chairmen who want their meetings to come to them, and anyone for whom the thought of sharing a lift with a person who is paying a mere £400 a night for their room is too much to bear. “The problem with the Excelsior suite” they say over at the Eden “is that it does not have its own entrance or lift. Ours has a private staircase from the lobby, and once you’re inside, there’s really no need to go out”. A private butler - and a wide terrace complete with jacuzzi - makes the going out even less of a necessity. Inside, in a landscape of frescoes inspired, sensibly enough, by Roman scenes, architect Lorenzo Bellini’s attention to detail is reassuringly obssessive: every light fitting, tap and curtain swag has been individually designed, and even the bathrobes, towels and bathroom slippers are embroidered with a motif which is exclusive to this suite.
It remains to be seen whether the “hotel within a hotel” idea will be a commercial success. If not, they could always try bed and breakfast. This article originally appeared in Conde Nast Traveller (UK)