To open a hotel in the heart of Rome is to accept that one is working on top of two thousand years of layered history. Palazzo Talìa, which debuted in 2024 on Largo del Nazareno — a concealed square five minutes’ walk from the Trevi Fountain — does so with unusual ease, occupying a 16th-century palazzo that once housed the Collegio Nazareno, a centuries-old school whose students included Alessandro Manzoni and Antonio Gramsci. Restoration began in 2021; the transformation into a twenty-five-room hotel took three years.

The hotel’s most unexpected voice is that of its interior designer. Studiolucaguadagnino, the design practice led by the filmmaker Luca Guadagnino — better known for Call Me By Your Name and Challengers than for hospitality — took the lead on the palazzo’s shared spaces, shaping them with the same cinematic instincts that mark his films. Expect deep chromatic fields rather than contrasts: oxblood walls giving way to burgundy, rose, and then a sage-leaning green; lighting considered as a scene rather than a layer. A signature piece — a sweeping, painterly rug by the Irish artist Nigel Peake — anchors the main salon, setting the palette for the rooms that open off it. Custom furniture, light fittings and wall coverings were produced with Italian artisans; the wellness area sets marble against a dome of pale green majolica tiles from Spain.

The twenty-five rooms and suites, individually designed by MIA Home Design Gallery together with Laura Feroldi Studio, preserve the palazzo’s original frescoes, coffered ceilings and stone door frames where they survive, and frame them with confident contemporary moves — velvet curtains in dusty pink or deep ivy, plush wool carpets, vintage Italian lamps, mid-century desks. Bathrooms, lined in pink-veined or green marble depending on the room, feel more like small chapels than amenities. Some suites open directly onto private loggias over the central courtyard; others look out over terracotta roofs towards the Quirinal.

Downstairs, Tramae — chef Marco Coppola’s reimagined Roman cucina — serves cacio e pepe with unexpected twists, clean-lined crudi and bread from nearby bakers, while Il Bar della Musa pours the aperitivo; the wellness programme draws on Roman bathing traditions, with a heated pool beneath barrel vaults, a Turkish bath and marble steam rooms. The cumulative effect, almost inevitably given its creator, is cinematic: a hotel that understands framing, colour and atmosphere as inseparable from architecture. Palazzo Talìa is not a literal restoration of the old collegio, but a moody, carefully lit reinterpretation — one that makes sense of its bones without pretending to re-enact them.