Inside the Bulgari Hotel Roma, a Dazzling New Jewel in the Eternal City’s Crown

July 5, 2023

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There’s a saying that Rome is like an onion: peel back one layer of history, and another layer reveals itself; peel back that layer, and find yet another. Frankly, there’s no better vantage point to appreciate that notion than from the Piazza Augusto Imperatore, just a hop, skip, and a jump away from the luxury boutiques that line the Via Condotti leading up to the Spanish Steps.

At its center sits the mausoleum of Augustus, the nephew of Julius Caesar and the first Roman emperor, who ruled for four decades. Surrounding it on three sides are the dramatic facades of the former social security headquarters for Mussolini’s government, designed in the Rationalist style that reinterpreted the columns and pediments of ancient Roman architecture into sleek surfaces and geometric shapes. Finally, on the side that flanks the river Tiber sits the Museum of the Ara Pacis, the impossibly elegant travertine and glass structure designed by the architectural titan Richard Meier and opened in 2006. (Within it sits the grand triumphal monument commissioned in 13 BC to mark the beginning of Augustus’s Pax Romana, the two decades of peace that saw the Roman empire reach the heights of its glories.)

This June, though, another layer of history was added to the grand piazza: the Bulgari Hotel Roma. While Bulgari first entered the hospitality game back in 2004 with their first property in Milan, the luxury jewelry house that was first founded in the city back in 1884—and whose riverfront headquarters are a two-minute walk from the Piazza Augusto—is now ready to return to its home in the heart of the eternal city. “We’ve been studying Rome since day one, waiting for the right building to materialize,” said Bulgari CEO Jean-Christophe Babin on the day before the hotel’s opening last month. “Once we found this extraordinary location, it was a no-brainer—we did everything possible to secure it. As you can imagine there were a lot of competitors, but eventually we made it.”

That the Bulgari Hotel Roma would deliver opulence at the grandest scale is something of a given. The enormous building that houses it has been meticulously renovated from top to toe (a four-year-long process due to its historic significance) with the restoration—overseen by the Roman architectural studio Studio Polis—returning, for example, the extraordinary mosaic on the facade that depicting the origin myths of Rome to its former glory.

Once you’ve stepped through its doors, however—whether from the piazza itself, where you’ll pass by an imposing sculpture of Augustus himself, or the more low-key entrance on the cobbled Via Ripetta—you’ll know immediately that you’re in Bulgari-land. With interiors by the Milanese studio Antonio Citterio Patricia Viel, which has overseen all of the previous Bulgari Hotel outposts in cities as far-flung as Los Angeles, Beijing, and Dubai, the codes are comfortingly familiar: glittering mosaic details, rippled marbles, lacquered wood, and crisp neutrals.

Yet while this glamorous, gilded formula is all present and correct, it’s also underpinned by a very Italian rigor that nods to the building’s origins in the 1930s, whether in the Ginori vases from the same decade designed by Gio Ponti, or the various original mid-century pieces dotted throughout the property. The hotel’s openness to the city that surrounds it, meanwhile, is signaled by an expansive library decorated with bookshelves originally designed by Albini for Cassina in the 1950s, stacked high with tomes documenting the city’s history of art and architecture, and intended to be a resource and study space for students at the fine arts academy located down the road as well as guests.

For anyone seeking solitude, there are private terraces on the top floors, as well as, of course, the 114 lavishly-appointed rooms and suites. There, you’ll find every luxury you’d expect from a hotel of this caliber—plush bedding, widescreen TVs, 24/7 room service offering Italian delicacies and hotel stalwarts—with a few more playful touches too: colorful marbles (Brocatelle, red jasper, Carrara) that line every surface and striking mosaics above many of the bathtubs that recreate the forms of Bulgari’s most iconic jewelry designs.

Lining the piazza, with floor-to-ceiling windows and extending outdoors under the porticos, you’ll find Il Caffé, which offers a full gamut of Roman specialties, from carbonara and cacio e pepe to saltimbocca alla Romana. The star dining destination, however, is Il Ristorante by Niko Romito. The three-Michelin-starred Italian chef has had a hand in all of the hotel’s food offerings, but it’s here that his innovative approach to the country’s cuisine truly shines. A tasting menu features a mash-up of tortelli pasta and panzanella with a delicate burrata cream and basil sauce, as well as veal alla Milanese cooked to crisp perfection—all finished, naturally, by a showstopping tiramisu.

Then, when you need to relax after a long day of walking from the Vatican to the Pantheon and back again, you’ll have one of the city’s most decadent spas to enjoy. Inspired by the 3rd-century Baths of Caracalla (which the front desk staff will happily arrange a visit to, accompanied by a charming local guide), the space is at once sumptuous and soothing. Not least within the spa complex’s dramatic centerpiece: a 20-meter pool featuring eight columns of arabesque marble, with sparkling niches of black-and-gold housing both relaxation areas and 19th-century replicas of classical statues. (The sleek, wood-paneled treatment rooms with their Augustinus Bader products and the cutting-edge fitness center aren’t half bad either.)

For all these cutting-edge luxuries, though, the project was underpinned by a deep reverence for the building that contains it, as well as the city that surrounds it—and most importantly, the deeply intertwined history between the two. While Bulgari has already supported urban renewal projects in the city (in 2016, for example, they funneled millions into a much-needed restoration of the Spanish Steps), with the hotel, they’re taking things a step further. Turns out that sculpture of Augustus sitting in the lobby isn’t just any old replica, but an original Roman piece, on loan from the Torlonia Foundation, whose collection Bulgari is helping to restore.

Nowhere was this interplay of past and present more visible than on the hotel’s glitzy opening night. Crowds of glamorous Romans who could have been plucked straight from a Paolo Sorrentino movie swarmed the step and repeat, while a handful of Bulgari ambassadors, including Zendaya and Priyanka Chopra Jonas, generated a frenzy as they posed for photographers, dripping in jewels. Champagne, canapés, and negronis circulated as guests were gently encouraged to make their way to the roof terrace, with its picture-postcard views of the city’s rooftops, stretching all the way from the Altare della Patria to the Villa Medici, as the skies turned an inky purple.

With the crowd assembled, a flock of twinkling drones rose from the building opposite and began to swirl above the tomb of the emperor, gathering to form some of Bulgari’s most iconic motifs—serpents, fanned triangles, the ancient Roman eight-pointed star—before spelling out “città eterna”: the eternal city. Ushering in another chapter in Rome’s multi-layered history, sure, but also looking firmly to its future.