Hotel Regency Firenze

Hotel Regency Firenze

At Hotel Regency Firenze, breakfast on the verandah of Relais Le Jardin looks over a walled garden thick with hedges, close enough to the Duomo and the Uffizi that both are an easy walk rather than a taxi ride. The building started in 1865 as the private residence of an Italian minister, and it still runs at that domestic scale: 31 rooms, 23 doubles and eight suites, spread across four floors, with an internal courtyard the hotel calls its Urban Garden. The dining room keeps the original grand mirrors and hand-painted glass, and guests can eat there or on the verandah looking onto the garden instead of a car park. It sits on Piazza D'Azeglio, one of the few green squares inside central Florence, so several rooms look onto trees rather than stone. Membership in Small Luxury Hotels of the World means the staff, who work in six languages, still recognize returning guests by the second morning, and the concierge arranges tours rather than handing over a map. The Family Suite holds up to five, bikes are free to borrow, and dogs under five kilos travel for a surcharge rather than a refusal. None of this suits travelers who want a resort-sized lobby full of strangers or want every extra bundled into the rate: parking runs 45 euros a day, an extra bed is 78 euros a night, and the city tax is separate. What few Florence hotels this central can offer is a walled 19th-century garden that used to belong to one family, and this one still serves dinner in it. A four-floor, 31-room Florentine villa from 1865, minutes from the Duomo, with its own walled Urban Garden and a dining room of original mirrors and hand-painted glass. Staff work in six languages, dogs under five kilos are welcome, and resort-sized crowds are not.