Rome Cavalieri, Waldorf Astoria Hotels & Resorts

Rome Cavalieri, Waldorf Astoria Hotels & Resorts

Built in 1963 on Monte Mario, the highest of Rome's seven hills and the one it does not share with any of the others, the hotel opened as the Cavalieri Hilton at the peak of the city's Dolce Vita years, when Fellini's Rome and Hilton's ambitions for Europe briefly pointed in the same direction. The architecture, by Ugo Luccichenti with structural work from Pier Luigi Nervi, is modular 1960s concrete, low and horizontal against the hillside rather than vertical, and the interiors were laid out by Franco Albini in the same linear, unfussy idiom that made his furniture designs enduring. Fifteen acres of Mediterranean parkland surround it, pine and cypress and umbrella pines planted thickly enough that the hotel disappears from most angles on the drive up, and the 370 rooms and suites, including 25 named suites, all look out over either the park, the city, or St Peter's dome, which is visible from nearly every upper floor. In September 2008 the hotel was relaunched as a Waldorf Astoria property, the first of the brand outside the United States, and it remains one of Hilton's flagship Waldorf Astoria hotels in Europe. The art collection runs to more than a thousand pieces, the largest privately held collection inside any hotel in the world, and the lobby alone holds three ceiling paintings by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo alongside period tapestries and antique furniture that predate the building by two centuries. Individual suites carry their own smaller collections: the Penthouse has pieces from Andy Warhol's Dollar Series and furniture designed by Karl Lagerfeld, the Napoleon Suite keeps old masters and eighteenth-century pieces in a room with three balconies and a private wine cellar, and the Planetarium Suite has an LED ceiling built to simulate a night sky over the bed. La Pergola, the rooftop restaurant run by chef Heinz Beck since 1994, holds three Michelin stars and is the only restaurant in Rome to do so, its fagottelli carbonara well known enough that Michelle Obama reportedly asked for the recipe after a visit. The Grand Spa Club covers around 26,000 square feet with four pools, one indoors, Technogym equipment, tennis courts and ten treatment rooms stocked with La Prairie and Natura Bissé. What it feels like, more than anything, is a resort that happens to be inside city limits, which is unusual for Rome and part of the point of staying there rather than in the centre. Guests who want the Colosseum from their balcony will not find it; what they get instead is quiet, distance, staff who have generally worked there for decades, and a scale, both architectural and horticultural, that no hotel inside the historic centre can offer. It has hosted enough visiting heads of state, and enough film productions (Julia Roberts lived in the Penthouse Suite while filming Eat Pray Love), that a certain amount of security-conscious formality is baked into the operation, and the attached convention centre means it is not unusual to share the lobby with a corporate event or, at points in the year, a wedding. You should not come here for proximity to the Forum or Trastevere, both of which require a taxi or the hotel shuttle, and you should not come if you find large hotel scale, or the presence of conference groups, at odds with what you want from Rome. You should come for the view of the whole city from a swimming pool, for a three-Michelin-starred dinner without leaving the property, for an art collection most museums would envy, and for the particular calm of staying somewhere with fifteen acres of pine trees between you and the traffic below. The short version: A 1963 Hilton-built resort on Monte Mario with 370 rooms and suites, fifteen acres of parkland, a thousand-piece art collection, and Rome's only three-Michelin-starred restaurant, fifteen minutes and one hill removed from the historic centre.