The door on Via del Duomo opens onto a cotto-tiled patio with a sculpted fountain, climbing plants and benches banded in black and sand — stripes borrowed from the travertine and basalt of the cathedral at the top of the street, and repeated throughout the house, up staircases and across bedheads. Check-in happens here, over a drink and something small to eat. Giuliano Andrea dell’Uva, who restored the palazzo, calls it a contemporary Grand Tour, and the rooms move between centuries without apology: Hans Wegner chairs and a Carlo Scarpa console under Renaissance frescoes, 1950s lamps by Hans-Agne Jakobsson beside a stone hearth tall enough to stand in, in the guests’ living room on the first floor.

No two of the nine rooms are alike. In one of the Junior Suites, a brass floor runs into terracotta, one wall is fresh clay and the other old plaster still carrying its painted decoration, and the bathroom lies through a stone doorway carved with the builder’s own name, PETRVS FACENIVS, onto a green resin floor and a round bathtub. One Deluxe Room looks down onto Via del Duomo from beneath a coffered ceiling painted with coats of arms and portraits, the other opens onto a small winter garden; a Superior Room is done in burgundy and black pepper, with a wardrobe of green clay and brass. At the top, the Penthouse Suite is reached through a steel door set in a stone frame inscribed in the sixteenth century; beyond the fireplace and the tufa walls, its terrace holds a plunge pool among the plants, facing the Duomo.

Breakfast is styled by Ronald Bukri, the chef and co-founder, who cooks at Coro in a deconsecrated sixteenth-century church next door: Umbrian produce as a ten-course tasting menu, under art by Michele Guido. Gocce, the bar off the courtyard, serves lunch and cocktails until midnight. The hotel is generous with the rest of the town, too — torta al semolino at Caffè Montanucci, a tagliere at Bottega Vera, pizza at Claudio al Vicolo, and at L’Orvietan a herbal bitter made to a recipe from 1603. Ask for lumachelle, the town’s pork-and-spice rolls, and umbrichelli, the thick hand-rolled pasta.

Orvieto rises on a tuff cliff between Florence and Rome, an hour by train from the capital, and the palazzo is in its middle. In the Duomo, Luca Signorelli’s Last Judgment is the fresco cycle Michelangelo studied before the Sistine Chapel; St. Patrick’s Well drops sixty-two metres on two spiral staircases that never meet; beneath the streets runs a second city of Etruscan and medieval caves. The house arranges the rest: a guided walk through the medieval lanes, tastings with the winemakers of Orvieto Classico or a private session with a sommelier, a ceramics class with Marino Moretti in his studio in the Rocca di Viceno, rides through the hills on horseback, yoga in the palazzo or out in the landscape, and a boat across Lake Bolsena to the islands of Martana and Bisentina. Further afield lie Civita di Bagnoregio on its crumbling ridge, Assisi and the Val d’Orcia.